Complementary peptides represent a credible alternative to agrochemicals by activating translation of targeted proteins.

The current agriculture main challenge is to maintain food production while facing multiple threats such as increasing world population, temperature increase, lack of agrochemicals due to health issues and uprising of weeds resistant to herbicides. Developing novel, alternative, and safe methods is hence of paramount importance. Here, we show that complementary peptides (cPEPs) from any gene can be designed to target specifically plant coding genes. External application of synthetic peptides increases the abundance of the targeted protein, leading to related phenotypes. Moreover, we provide evidence that cPEPs can be powerful tools in agronomy to improve plant traits, such as growth, resistance to pathogen or heat stress, without the needs of genetic approaches. Finally, by combining their activity they can also be used to reduce weed growth. Feeding an increasing world population in the context of climate change is one of the grand challenges faced by our generation. Here, the authors show that external application of synthetic complementary peptides can increase the abundance of target proteins to modulate plant growth or stress resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]