Into the weeds: new insights in plant stress

Weeds, plants that thrive in the face of disturbance, have eluded human’s attempts at control for >12 000 years, positioning them as a unique group of extreme stress tolerators. The most successful weeds have a suite of traits that enable them to rapidly adapt to environments typified by stress, growing in hostile conditions or subject to massive destruction from agricultural practices. Through their ability to persist and adapt, weeds illuminate principles of evolution and provide insights into weed management and crop improvement. Here we highlight why the time is right to move beyond traditional model systems and leverage weeds to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, adaptations, and genetic and physiological bases for stress tolerance. Weeds are among the great survivors of the plant kingdom, persisting and thriving in disrupted environments and in the face of persecution by humans. They are an excellent resource for understanding plant stress.Weeds are generally present in large populations and wide geographic distributions, representing an abundance of genetic information that has previously been difficult to tap.Recent advances in sequencing efficiency enable studies that can correlate the genetic diversity of weeds with adaptive traits to begin to understand the genetic bases for stress tolerance.Understanding the mechanisms by which weeds respond to stress has implications for basic plant biology, crop improvement, and weed control.