Plants are able to plastically adapt their development, metabolism and defense status dependent on environmental cues. This is a continuous process but requires substantial reprogramming of the plant´s transcriptome under stress. The regulatory circuits of transcriptional stress adaptation are incompletely understood in plants, and this is particularly true for Triticeae crop plants. The difficulty of understanding stress adaptation increases with the complexity of the environment. However, studying adaption to multiple stresses is necessary for deciphering of how plants function in fields and in future changing environments. We study crop plant transcriptional reprogramming under single and multiple stress situations. We mainly focus on biotic stress such as Fusarium Head Blight of barley, alone or in combination with drought and heat stress to understand climate change related stress responses and resilience. By further integrating differential stress-sensitive plant genotypes and bioinformatics on gene co-expression patterns and gene regulatory networks, we identify trait-associated gene expression modules and their key regulatory players. We address such players by genetic tools to evidence their function in stress responses and stress defense. Genotype dependency of quantitative readouts may further inform plant breeding or biotechnology for improved stress resistance of future crop plants.