Abstract:
Temperature is one of the decisive environmental factors that is projected to increase
by 1. 5◦C over the next two decades due to climate change that may affect various
agronomic characteristics, such as biomass production, phenology and physiology, and
yield-contributing traits in oilseed crops. Oilseed crops such as soybean, sunflower,
canola, peanut, cottonseed, coconut, palm oil, sesame, safflower, olive etc., are
widely grown. Specific importance is the vulnerability of oil synthesis in these crops
against the rise in climatic temperature, threatening the stability of yield and quality.
The natural defense system in these crops cannot withstand the harmful impacts
of heat stress, thus causing a considerable loss in seed and oil yield. Therefore, a
proper understanding of underlying mechanisms of genotype-environment interactions
that could affect oil synthesis pathways is a prime requirement in developing stable
cultivars. Heat stress tolerance is a complex quantitative trait controlled by many
genes and is challenging to study and characterize. However, heat tolerance studies
to date have pointed to several sophisticated mechanisms to deal with the stress
of high temperatures, including hormonal signaling pathways for sensing heat stimuli
and acquiring tolerance to heat stress, maintaining membrane integrity, production of
heat shock proteins (HSPs), removal of reactive oxygen species (ROS), assembly of
antioxidants, accumulation of compatible solutes, modified gene expression to enable
changes, intelligent agricultural technologies, and several other agronomic techniques for
thriving and surviving. Manipulation of multiple genes responsible for thermo-tolerance
and exploring their high expressions greatly impacts their potential application using
Ahmad et al. Heat Stress Tolerance in Oilseed Crops
CRISPR/Cas genome editing and OMICS technology. This review highlights the latest
outcomes on the response and tolerance to heat stress at the cellular, organelle,
and whole plant levels describing numerous approaches applied to enhance thermos tolerance in oilseed crops. We are attempting to critically analyze the scattered existing
approaches to temperature tolerance used in oilseeds as a whole, work toward extending
studies into the field, and provide researchers and related parties with useful information
to streamline their breeding programs so that they can seek new avenues and develop
guidelines that will greatly enhance ongoing efforts to establish heat stress tolerance
in oilseeds.
