During the last years, a great effort has been dedicated at the development and employment of diverse approaches for achieving more stress-tolerant and climateflexible crops and sustainable yield increases to meet the food and energy demands of the future. The ongoing climate change is in fact leading to more frequent extreme events with a negative impact on food production, such as increased temperatures, drought, and soil salinization as well as invasive arthropod pests and diseases. In this review, diverse "green strategies" (e.g., chemical priming, root-associated microorganisms), and advanced technologies (e.g., genome editing, high-throughput phenotyping) are described on the basis of the most recent research evidence. Particularly, attention has been focused on the potential use in a context of sustainable and climate-smart agriculture (the so called "next agriculture generation") to improve plant tolerance and resilience to abiotic and biotic stresses. In addition, the gap between the results obtained in controlled experiments and those from application of these technologies in real field conditions (lab to field step) is also discussed.
| INTRODUCTIONCrop plants are continuously exposed to multiple abiotic and/or biotic stressors, leading to hindered growth and development and, subsequently, loss of productivity and crop quality. Examples of such stress factors include both abiotic factors such as drought, salinity, and heat, as well biotic stressors such as attack by fungal pathogens and insects, among others. The severity of the effect of such stressors can be clearly attested by multi-billion dollar losses in yield (FAO 2017 report, http://www.fao.org/3/I8656EN/i8656en.pdf). Recent climate model projections show that the Mediterranean basin is one of the regions that will be influenced mostly by climate change (IPCC, 2019). For this reason, improvement of the tolerance, of relevant crops, to water deficit and heat crucial to adapt to climate changes. In this context, reducing crop yield losses and increasing agricultural water use efficiency (WUE) in the Mediterranean region,