Do fungal-endosymbionts improve crop nutritional quality and tolerance to stress by boosting flavonoid-mediated responses?

Abstract

Climate change is threatening human activities, but the combination of water scarcity and heat waves are particularly challenging agriculture. Accumulating literature shows that beneficial fungal endophytes improve plant performance, a condition that seems to be magnified in presence of stress. Because evidence points out to an endophytic mediation of antioxidant activity in plants, we here focused on flavonoids for two main reasons: (i) they are involved in plant tolerance to abiotic stress, and (ii) they are known to be healthy for human consumption. With these two premises as guidance, we explored the literature trying to link mechanistically the relationship between endophytes and plant responses to stress as well as identifying patterns and knowledge gaps. Overall, fungal endophytes improve plant growth and tolerance to environmental stresses. However, evidence for endophytes boosting flavonoid mediated responses in plants is relatively scarce. Reports showing endophytes promoting flavonoid contents in grains and fresh fruits are rather limited which may be related to (long) length of the required experiments for testing it. The use of endophytes isolated from extreme environments (e.g., dry and cold deserts, acid lakes, etc.) is proposed to be better in conferring tolerance to plants under very stressful conditions. However, the real challenge is to test the capacity of these endophytes to established and maintain persistent and functional symbiosis under productive conditions. In summary, there is a clear potential for symbiotically modifying crop plants as a strategy to develop more tolerant varieties to face the stress and eventually increase the quality of the agricultural products.