Tag: Heat Stress

When plants first moved onto land, they encountered challenges that aquatic ancestors never faced, including heat, dehydration, and rapidly changing environmental conditions. This review by Wang et al., explores how cytokinin signaling, a pathway best known for regulating plant growth and development,…

Crops such as rice usually flower in the late morning when the ambient temperature rises. Rice plants briefly open their flowers so the mature anthers hang out. However, heat stress can trigger abnormal anther dehiscence, flower infertility, and subsequent yield reduction. Early-morning flowering…

Climate change brings about higher temperatures, threatening plant populations worldwide. Higher temperatures interfere with reproductive processes such as pollen production or fertilization, even if the plant itself can withstand these temperatures. For example, some plants can withstand temperatures…

Elucidating the pathways in which plants can recognize and respond to heat stress is a key step in developing more resilient plants and crops. Work by Li et al. provides a more in-depth understanding of the early factors in heat stress-responsive (HSR) gene expression in Arabidopsis. They first identified…

The June 12 issue of Science has a focus on plants and heat that includes several excellent review and research articles. In a very interesting review, Singh Yadav et al. discuss the complex and fascinating question of how plants sense temperature, emphasizing both the biophysical nature of temperature…

Plant metabolism varies substantially between developmental stages, cell types, and intracellular environments. Similarly, biochemical responses to abiotic stress often deviate between neighboring cell types, but discerning what is changing where becomes more challenging in smaller and more fragile sub-compartments. …

Rice is one of the most important food crops globally, providing more than 20% of the world’s calorie intake and over 75% for the population in Asia. Therefore, apart from yield, grain quality is another critical agronomic trait for breeding and improvement, especially under stressful environmental…

The heat shock response, a rapid transcriptional response to heat, was first observed nearly 60 years ago, and has long been a paradigm for understanding gene responses to exogenous cues. The family of genes encoding heat shock factors (HSFs) is greatly expanded in plants. These HSFs serve as key regulators…