One of the penultimate aims in farming is to grow high yielding crops in a sustainable way. One of the main issues facing breeders, however, is how to balance plant immunity with improved nutrient use efficiency and other value-added attributes. Here we review some of the recent advances in understanding plant–microbe symbioses, and propose how these data may help future breeding effort to produce stronger crop varieties that require fewer inputs while maintaining high productivity.

Stress signals induced by ABA can improve a plants’ resistance to water stress. We investigated the effects of transportation of stress signals among interconnected ramets on resistance response of clonal plant Centella asiatica subjected to water stress. Our results demonstrate that transportation of stress signals among interconnected ramets improved systemic resistance and growth performance of whole clonal fragments.

Natural populations may exhibit phenotypic plasticity in response to variable climate conditions. Hydraulic traits conferring drought tolerance, measured on three populations of Banksia serrata (Proteaceae) native to sites characterised by contrasting climates, were generally invariable. B. serrata has limited capacity to adjust hydraulic architecture and therefore is susceptible to longer dry periods predicted with future climate change.

Ample evidence verifies that fruit upregulates photosynthesis of horticultural plants to meet the high sink demand but how fruit affects photosynthetic light responses remains uncertain. For Shiraz vines, those with fruit had assimilation rates biased towards higher temperatures while vines without fruit were biased towards lower temperatures. Demand for photoassimilates, therefore, induced an acclimation response, suggesting dynamic control to match demand with climate.

Understanding sexual dimorphism in dioecious plants is critical for assessing sex-specific ecophysiological performance. We report intersexual differences in leaf traits of Pistacia vera under sun and shade conditions. Females invested more in high xylem efficiency and C gain; males invested more in defence-protection. Each sex displayed a different strategy to attain optimisation to light variation but the degree of plasticity was similar. These differences may reflect the sex-specific strategies resulting from the different reproductive investments and could produce sex-related differences in tolerance.

Xerohalophytes such as Zygophyllum xanthoxylum have evolved unique strategies adapting to salinity and are more appropriate than glycophytes in studying salt tolerance. Here we used RNA sequencing to compare the different gene expressions between Z. xanthoxylum and Arabidopsis thaliana under NaCl treatment. Results showed that many genes related to ion transport, reactive oxygen species scavenging, hormone biosynthesis and response in Z. xanthoxylum responded to NaCl more actively than A. thaliana, and these may play important roles in salt resistance of Z. xanthoxylum.

In theory, plants have evolved to maximise the efficiency with which they use light (maximise photosynthesis per unit light), yet there is limited empirical evidence to show that efficiency can have strong effects on plant growth. By exposing plants to different distributions of light in the day, we demonstrated that low efficiency can reduce plant growth by nearly 50%. Thus, we found clear support for the general expectation that light use efficiency is a central determinant of plant performance.