Molecular insights into sensing, regulation and improving of heat tolerance in plants.

Climate-change-mediated increase in temperature extremes has become a threat to plant productivity. Heat stress-induced changes in growth pattern, sensitivity to pests, plant phonologies, flowering, shrinkage of maturity period, grain filling, and increased senescence result in significant yield losses. Heat stress triggers multitude of cellular, physiological and molecular responses in plants beginning from the early sensing followed by signal transduction, osmolyte synthesis, antioxidant defense, and heat stress-associated gene expression.

A potential seedling-stage evaluation method for heat tolerance in Indian mustard ( L. Czern and Coss).

Heat stress is one of the major limitations to crop productivity. In the present study, an efficient method of screening was adopted for identification of heat tolerant Indian Mustard genotypes by applying 4-day cycle of heat stress to seedlings. Thirty-four genotypes were screened based upon lipid peroxidation and survival percentage and classified them into five different classes according to membership function value (MFV) for response against high temperature.