Editorial: Polyamines in plant stress responses and development

Ana Isabel González-Hernández, Loredana Maria Scalschi, Aziz Aziz

In the face of accelerating climate change, marked mainly by severe drought events and extreme temperatures, the search for sustainable strategies to enhance crop resilience has intensified. Polyamines (PAs), ubiquitous low-molecular-weight aliphatic nitrogenous bases such as putrescine, spermidine, spermine, and thermospermine, are recognized as critical nitrogenous master regulators of plant growth and cellular development, and pivotal defensive buffers against biotic and abiotic stresses (Blázquez, 2024). This Research Topic brings together outstanding contributions on recent advancements in PA research, from molecular fine-tuning of vascular developmental pathways to innovative nano-biotechnological applications and targeted chemical priming to improve multi-stress resilience. These advances collectively demonstrate how mechanistic insights into PA metabolism, signaling, and delivery can be translated into practical strategies for improving crop performance under increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions.At the molecular level, PAs play an indispensable role in normal plant development.Because key PA biosynthetic enzymes are heavily governed by post-transcriptional and translational mechanisms, transcript levels often fail to reflect actual protein abundance. To solve this, Ritchie et al. (2025) developed a highly optimized, non-derivatized liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) toolkit and stable non-radioactive heavy isotope substrates. The authors successfully established a method to simultaneously quantify the kinetic activities of both arginine decarboxylase (ADC) and ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) alongside 11 network-related metabolites in a single MS run. Using this platform to analyze CRISPR-Cas9-engineered tomato, the authors demonstrate that ADC pathway is completely indispensable for floral morphogenesis, since the tomato adc1 adc2 double mutant presented a complete failure to form flower buds or reproductive organs. ODC pathway remained in the adc1 adc2 plants 38 but could not compensate for the loss ADC-driven PA synthesis.A foundational aspect of polyamine biology is its structural and functional specificity.