Functional genomic approaches to improve crop plant heat stress tolerance.

Baljeet Singh,Shristy Gautam,Kajal Thakur,Umesh Goutam,Sarvjeet Kukreja,Neha Salaria

doi:10.12688/f1000research.19840.1

Abstract

Heat stress as a yield limiting issue has become a major threat for food security as global warming progresses. Being sessile, plants cannot avoid heat stress. They respond to heat stress by activating complex molecular networks, such as signal transduction, metabolite production and expressions of heat stress-associated genes. Some plants have developed an intricate signalling network to respond and adapt it. Heat stress tolerance is a polygenic trait, which is regulated by various genes, transcriptional factors, proteins and hormones. Therefore, to improve heat stress tolerance, a sound knowledge of various mechanisms involved in the response to heat stress is required. The classical breeding methods employed to enhance heat stress tolerance has had limited success. In this era of genomics, next generation sequencing techniques, availability of genome sequences and advanced biotechnological tools open several windows of opportunities to improve heat stress tolerance in crop plants. This review discusses the potential of various functional genomic approaches, such as genome wide association studies, microarray, and suppression subtractive hybridization, in the process of discovering novel genes related to heat stress, and their functional validation using both reverse and forward genetic approaches. This review also discusses how these functionally validated genes can be used to improve heat stress tolerance through plant breeding, transgenics and genome editing approaches.

Highlights

Abiotic stresses have numerous adverse effects on crop plants, which further lead to yield and quality losses (Figure 1)
The functional genomic approaches such as genome wide association studies (GWAS) and gene expression profiling using microarrays can catalyse the discovery of novel genes associated to heat stress6–8
Plants respond to heat stress by activating complex molecular networks, such as signal transduction, metabolite production and expressions of heat stress-associated genes

Summary

Introduction

Last two lines of introduction can be improved. Authors written reverse genetic techniques can improve the understanding of their expression patterns under heat stress. I suggest that instead of writing reverse genetic techniques they should mention the names of these techniques. Mining of stress linked genes Authors mentioned: Singh et al (2015) investigated the heat responsive genes for potato tuberization and Ginzberg et al identified the candidate heat responsive genes for potato periderm formation using microarrays. I suggest, either write the year with Ginzberg et al or remove year from Singh et al (2015) to keep the same formatting. Validating the stress responsive genes I found this section is very interesting. Approaches to enhance heat tolerance Do not write the gene name; AmDREB2C in Italics as rest of the gene names in text are not written in Italics

Conclusion

11. Hussain B

14. Machida-Hirano R

31. Ji Q: Gene Identification