Abstract: Anticipated more frequent extreme events due to changes in global climatic variability requires adaptation of crop species to multi-occurrence abiotic stresses hereby sustaining the food security.  Priming, by pre-exposure of plants to an eliciting factor, enables plants to be more tolerant to later biotic or abiotic stress events.  Priming induced “stress memory” exists in both present generation and the offspring.  Thus, priming is suggested to be a promising strategy for plants to cope with the abiotic stresses under global change scenarios.  In this review, the underlying physiological and molecular mechanisms of priming induced enhancement of stress tolerance to the major abiotic stresses of drought and waterlogging, and high and low temperature in crop plants were discussed, and the potential to utilize the priming effect for sustaining crop productivity in future climates was also suggested.

Key words: priming , stress memory , transgenerational priming , physiological mechanisms