10. CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
With global climate change, increasing temperature has an enormous
impact on crop productivity from seedling to mature stages.
Climate-smart crops will benefit from a better understanding of high
temperature-associated processes. Although our knowledge on these
processes has increased a lot in crops, most of the regulatory
mechanisms associated with high temperature have been explored in the
model plant Arabidopsis and are still elusive in many crops.
While in some cases the knowledge gained from Arabidopsis can be
translated to crops, there are also many unique aspects to crops. For
example, with respect to high temperature-regulated growth it is not
clear if the same cooling role from dicots can be assigned to monocot
crop plants. This warrants exploring high temperature-related mechanisms
directly in the relevant crop.
Understanding the molecular mechanism of how early developmental delay
is regulated is an important consideration, especially given that
unseasonal warm weather will disrupt vernalization significantly
affecting flowering and subsequent grain production in winter crops. For
example, the slow, winter-long upregulation of VERNALIZATION
INSENSITIVE 3 (VIN3 ) through NTL8 in Arabidopsis ,
provides – in addition to direct thermosensing mechanisms – a
long-term biological sensing of naturally fluctuating temperatures
(Zhao, Antoniou-Kourounioti, Calder, Dean, & Howard, 2020).
In addition, crop yield and quality are affected by increased
respiration caused by warmer night temperature, which is likely to occur
in the near future. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying
organ sterility at high temperature is an essential countermeasure for
global warming. Given the complexity of high temperature responses
(growth stages, different organs, time of day, multiple sensing
mechanisms, etc), it is extremely difficult to capture this in breeding
approaches. Dissection of the molecular responses that occur under warm
(night-time) temperatures will therefore benefit from a
multi-disciplinary approach that includes physiology, developmental
biology and modelling.