High temperature stress events are critical factors inhibiting crop yield. Meanwhile, world population is growing very rapidly and will be reached up to 9 billion by 2050. To feed increasing world population, it is challenging task to increase about 70% global food productions. Food crops have significant contribution toward global food demand and food security. However, consequences from increasing heat stress events are demolishing their abilities to survive and sustain yield when subjected to extreme high temperature stress. Therefore, there is dire need to better understand response and tolerance mechanism of food crops following exposure to heat stress. Here, we aimed to provide recent update on impact of high temperature stress on crop yield of food crops, pollination, pollinators, and novel strategies for improving tolerance of food crop under high temperature stress. Importantly, development of heat-resistant transgenic food crops can grant food security through transformation of superior genes into current germplasm, which are associated with various signaling pathways as well as epigenetic regulation in response to extreme high temperature stress.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a well-known pathogen to establish chronic infection leading to end-stage liver disease. The destruction of liver tissues takes its roots under chronic inflammation and proinflammatory signaling in liver microenvironment. The viral proteins interact with certain pattern recognition receptors, including Toll-like receptors, activating the innate immune system to clear the virus. HCV achieves immune evasion through other mechanisms and induce a continuous inflammatory microenvironment via Kupffer cells and Hepatic Stellate cells. This promotes disease progression. The current study aims to elucidate that the role of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) induced innate immune response in chronic inflammation in patients chronically infected with HCV. For this purpose, changes in downstream signaling cascade of TLR4 during chronic HCV infection using peripheral blood mononuclear cells of chronic HCV patients were studied. We found significant increase in expression levels of proinflammatory and profibrotic genes induced by TLR4 Myeloid differentiation factor 88 (MyD88)-dependent pathway between treatment naive and healthy controls, while no significant difference between the expressions of genes involved in TLR4 signaling was found between treatment responders and healthy controls. Interestingly, both TLR4 MyD88-dependent and-independent pathways were found to be operational in nonresponders to interferon treatment. This further strengthens the involvement of innate immune signaling as a leading factor in HCV-mediated liver disease progression and the role of TLR4 MyD88-dependent and-independent pathway in ensuring the conditions for chronic inflammation.

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Type 2-diabetes, particularly poorly controlled diabetes, is a risk factor for several infections such as lower respiratory tract and skin infections. Hyperglycemia, a characteristic downstream effect of poorly controlled diabetes, has been shown to impair the function of immune cells, in particular neutrophils. Several studies have demonstrated that hyperglycemia-mediated priming of NADPH oxidase results in subsequent elevated levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). In healthy neutrophils, ROS plays an important role in pathogen killing by phagocytosis and by induction of Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs). Given the key role of ROS in autophagy, phagocytosis and NETosis, the relationship between these pathways and the role of diabetes in the modulation of these pathways has not been explored previously. Therefore, our study aimed to understand the relationship between autophagy, phagocytosis and NETosis in diabetes. We hypothesized that hyperglycemia-associated oxidative stress alters the balance between phagocytosis and NETosis by modulating autophagy. Using whole blood samples from individuals with and without type 2-diabetes (in the presence and absence of hyperglycemia), we demonstrated that (i) hyperglycemia results in elevated levels of ROS in neutrophils from those with diabetes, (ii) elevated levels of ROS increase LCIII (a marker for autophagy) and downstream NETosis. (iii) Diabetes was also found to be associated with low levels of phagocytosis and phagocytic killing of S. pneumoniae. (iv) Blocking either NADPH oxidase or cellular pathways upstream of autophagy led to a significant reduction in NETosis. This study is the first to demonstrate the role of ROS in altering NETosis and phagocytosis by modulating autophagy in type 2-diabetes.

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The mutations are genetic changes in the genome sequences and have a significant role in biotechnology, genetics, and molecular biology even to find out the genome sequences of a cell DNA along with the viral RNA sequencing. The mutations are the alterations in DNA that may be natural or spontaneous and induced due to biochemical reactions or radiations which damage cell DNA. There is another cause of mutations which is known as transposons or jumping genes which can change their position in the genome during meiosis or DNA replication. The transposable elements can induce by self in the genome due to cellular and molecular mechanisms including hypermutation which caused the localization of transposable elements to move within the genome. The use of induced mutations for studying the mutagenesis in crop plants is very common as well as a promising method for screening crop plants with new and enhanced traits for the improvement of yield and production. The utilization of insertional mutations through transposons or jumping genes usually generates stable mutant alleles which are mostly tagged for the presence or absence of jumping genes or transposable elements. The transposable elements may be used for the identification of mutated genes in crop plants and even for the stable insertion of transposable elements in mutated crop plants. The guanine nucleotide-binding (GTP) proteins have an important role in inducing tolerance in rice plants to combat abiotic stress conditions.