Abstract

Plants are exposed to various abiotic and biotic stress factors, including drought, heat, salinity, disease, and pests, which ultimately impair crop yields, nutrient quality, and global food security. Genetic and metabolic engineering approaches enhance key antioxidants that protect plants against stressors that require sustainable defense and plant resilience. Multiple environmental stress mitigating strategies are crucial for sustainable crop production. Unfortunately, plants adapting to challenging environmental conditions are always challenging, and their solution using traditional breeding strategies is often time-consuming. Thus, suitable molecular strategies for crop improvement are highly demanded. This study highlights the cutting-edge solutions of plant improvement through the application of CRISPR/Cas9, synthetic biology, genetic/metabolic engineering, and multiomics approaches for enhancing antioxidants that are required for plant stress defense and stress resilience. This study further provides strategies for enhancing flavonoids, carotenoids, and other defense molecules by modifying key enzymatic pathways, including the carotenoid and beta-carotene, or phenylpropanoid pathways. The combined application of these molecular tools and sustainable strategies opens a new avenue of improving plant defense, stress resilience, and sustainable crop production for global food security.

Key words: Antioxidant, Metabolic engineering, Plant defense, Pathway optimization