review · Frontiers in Plant Science
Rising temperatures driven by climate change threaten major oilseed crops such as soybean, sunflower, canola, and peanut by disrupting biomass production, phenology, and oil synthesis pathways. Because natural plant defence systems struggle under heat stress, substantial losses in seed and oil yields occur. Thermotolerance is a complex quantitative trait governed by numerous genes. Plants counter heat through hormone signalling, membrane stability maintenance, heat shock protein generation, reactive oxygen species scavenging, and compatible solute accumulation. Mitigating climate impacts requires a detailed understanding of genotype and environment interactions. By combining agronomic methods, intelligent agricultural technologies, omics platforms, and CRISPR/Cas genome editing, researchers can manipulate thermotolerance genes. Reviewing these cellular, organelle, and whole-plant mechanisms provides actionable insights to help breeders develop resilient oilseed cultivars that maintain stable yields and oil quality in warming environments.
Oilseed crops provide essential food and industrial oils worldwide, but rising global temperatures jeopardise their harvest stability and nutritional quality. Unravelling the biological mechanisms of heat stress tolerance allows agricultural scientists to protect oil synthesis pathways against climate disruption. This knowledge is crucial for sustaining global vegetable oil supplies and supporting food security under escalating climate pressures.
The identified genetic and physiological mechanisms can inform crop breeders, seed companies, and agricultural biotechnology organisations seeking to develop climate-resilient oilseed varieties using CRISPR/Cas and omics tools. Because the findings outline biological mechanisms and breeding guidelines rather than validated commercial seed products, the work remains at an early research stage.
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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 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.
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DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2021.767150
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