The Whole Is Not Always the Sum of the Parts: Synergistic Plant Responses to Combined Environmental Stresses

Abstract

Numerous studies examining plant-environment stress interactions cultivate plants under optimal, non-stressful conditions before introducing individual stress factors to analyse response mechanisms, which clearly is an oversimplification. In nature, plants thrive under suboptimal conditions, encountering multiple environmental cues such as day-night temperature variation, abiotic stressors, soil heterogeneity, pathogens, herbivores and so forth.