Alternative Splicing Responses to Plant–Biotic Interactions and Abiotic Stresses in Plants

Alternative splicing (AS) is a crucial post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism in eukaryotes. Plants can cope with complex environmental changes through AS. In this paper, we found that AS plays an important role in plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. First, we note that under biotic stress (e.g., disease, insects), AS regulates the expression of immune-related genes and produces splice variants with different functions to regulate plant disease resistance. Second, under abiotic stress (e.g., drought, cold, heat, salt), plants generate functional splice variants via different AS events and change the original function of the gene. At the same time, we also found that splicing factors and regulatory elements, such as serine/arginine-rich proteins associated with AS, are also involved in the regulation of the expression of related resistance genes to improve plant stress resistance. Therefore, this review summarizes the recent progress on the main types of AS events, the functions of related splicing factors, and the action routes and regulatory mechanisms of splice variants. We hope to provide a reference for further understanding of the stress response mechanism of plant AS and provide a theoretical basis for the breeding of resistant varieties.