Wheat Responses and Tolerance to High Temperature

Abstract

Hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum) is a globally important crop. Heat stress dramatically reduces wheat yield and quality, and model predictions indicate that global wheat production will fall by 6% per 1 °C increase in temperature. Correspondingly, wheat has developed a series of molecular mechanisms to cope with climate variations and to protect themselves from injury and damage. Therefore, investigation of how wheat responds to elevated temperatures will provide important strategies to help develop new varieties adapted to temperature variations, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are still largely unknown. In this review, we focused on the recent studies of heat responses in wheat from omics perspective and shed light on understanding heat-responsive mechanisms that gene expression, protein synthesis, and epigenetic modification are significantly altered when subjected to heat stress. With the development of wheat transformation technique, it would be applicable to modify heat responses by manipulating expression patterns of related genes, and the omics findings paved the way to identify candidate genes improving heat tolerance in wheat.