The research progress and future directions of genome editing for crop heat tolerance improvement
Global climate change has intensified the frequency of extreme heat events, posing severe threats to crop yield, quality, and food security, making the breeding of heat-tolerant crops a key frontier in agricultural research. Although traditional breeding and marker-assisted selection have achieved progress in heat tolerance improvement, their applications remain limited due to complex genetic backgrounds, long breeding cycles, and insufficient mapping precision. In recent years, genome editing technologies, particularly the CRISPR/Cas system, have provided new breakthroughs for enhancing crop heat tolerance owing to their efficiency, precision, and flexibility. This paper systematically reviews the key molecular mechanisms underlying crop responses to heat stress, including heat signal perception, heat shock protein networks, transcriptional regulation hubs, reactive oxygen species metabolism, and phytohormone pathways, and summarizes potential editable targets. On this basis, it...