**4. Future prospects**

Many studies have expressed and emphasized elicitation's effect on gene expression in medicinal plants, including salt treatments. With plant tissue culture and genetic engineering applications, regulating the biosynthesis pathways of commercially valuable, potent, effective, and specific terpenes can be modified and improved. By revealing the effects of these applications holistically, it will be possible to produce terpenes, which are especially important in medical terms, on an industrial scale, and at an affordable cost.

Overall, since high salt stress affects the total amount and metabolite profile of secondary metabolites produced, it is clear that salinity regulation can be a promising way to obtain new compounds from plants to produce active PSMs such as raw pharmaceutical materials. In addition, considering the changing climatic conditions and soil profile, it is vital to understand the plant biosynthetic pathways that lead to the production of terpenes, which have a wide range of economic value through salt stress, and ultimately determine how to manipulate these pathways. Accordingly, applying transcriptome and metabolome data to examine gene-metabolite networks at both regulatory and catalytic levels for secondary metabolism in plants will also be an essential approach to reveal the PSM production profile. Additionally, modulation of plant metabolic pathways, leading to target metabolite production through the development of efficient modeling strategies and optimization of growth conditions may help improve the production of important bioactive molecules through bioreactors.
