Yujun Xie’s research while affiliated with Zhejiang A & F University and other places

With the intensification of the greenhouse effect, a series of natural phenomena, such as global warming, are gradually recognized; when the ambient temperature increases to the extent that it causes heat stress in plants, agricultural production will inevitably be affected. Therefore, several issues associated with heat stress in crops urgently need to be solved. Rice is one of the momentous food crops for humans, widely planted in tropical and subtropical monsoon regions. It is prone to high temperature stress in summer, leading to a decrease in yield and quality. Understanding how rice can tolerate heat stress through genetic effects is particularly vital. This article reviews how rice respond to rising temperature by integrating the molecular regulatory pathways and introduce its physiological mechanisms of tolerance to heat stress from the perspective of molecular biology. In addition, genome selection and genetic engineering for rice heat tolerance were emphasized to provide a theoretical basis for the sustainability and stability of crop yield-quality structures under high temperatures from the point of view of molecular breeding.

How to improve the yield of crops has always been the focus of breeding research. Due to the population growth and global climate change, the demand for food has increased sharply, which has brought great challenges to agricultural production. In order to make up for the limitation of global cultivated land area, it is necessary to further improve the output of crops. Photosynthesis is the main source of plant assimilate accumulation, which has a profound impact on the formation of its yield. This review focuses on the cultivation of high light efficiency plants, introduces the main technical means and research progress in improving the photosynthetic efficiency of plants, and discusses the main problems and difficulties faced by the cultivation of high light efficiency plants. At the same time, in view of the frequent occurrence of high-temperature disasters caused by global warming, which seriously threatened plant normal production, we reviewed the response mechanism of plants to heat stress, introduced the methods and strategies of how to cultivate heat tolerant crops, especially rice, and briefly reviewed the progress of heat tolerant research at present. Given big progress in these area, the era of cultivating smart rice with high light efficiency and heat tolerance has come of age.

qRT-PCR is one of the widely used methods for analysing the expression levels of specific genes, which requires reliable experimental results with the aid of stably-expressed reference genes. Although there are some common housekeeping genes, many experiments have proved that the expression of these genes can change under different experimental conditions. Heat stress is one of the key factors affecting rice yield and quality, and there are relatively few reports of reference genes that can be used for heat stress research. To find the reference genes that can be stably expressed under heat stress, this experiment analysed 10 common reference genes and 10 new candidate genes by qRT-PCR to explore their expression patterns in rice heat-tolerant variety HT54 and heat-sensitive variety HT13 under heat stress conditions, and used GeNorm, NormFinder, BestKeeper, ΔCT and RefFinder to evaluate the expression stability of these genes. The results showed that LOC_Os06g23160, b-TUB and eIF-4a were the most stably expressed genes in HT13 and combined analysis of these three reference genes are recommended to be used for qRT-PCR normalisation. Our results also showed that LOC_Os06g23160 was an excellent reference gene more stable than common reference genes such as 18S RNA in both HT13 and HT54.