Plants offer a habitat for a range of interactions to occur among different stress factors. Epigenetics has become the most promising functional genomics tool, with huge potential for improving plant adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. Advances in plant molecular biology have dramatically changed our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that control these interactions, and plant epigenetics has attracted great interest in this context. Accumulating literature substantiates the crucial role of epigenetics in the diversity of plant responses that can be harnessed to accelerate the progress of crop improvement. However, harnessing epigenetics to its full potential will require a thorough understanding of the epigenetic modifications and assessing the functional relevance of these variants. The modern technologies of profiling and engineering plants at genome-wide scale provide new horizons to elucidate how epigenetic modifications occur in plants in response to stress conditions. This review summarizes recent progress on understanding the epigenetic regulation of plant stress responses, methods to detect genome-wide epigenetic modifications, and disentangling their contributions to plant phenotypes from other sources of variations. Key epigenetic mechanisms underlying stress memory are highlighted. Linking plant response with the patterns of epigenetic variations would help devise breeding strategies for improving crop performance under stressed scenarios.

Allelopathy is an ecological phenomenon that involves the production and release of biomolecules from different crops, cultivated plants, and bacteria or fungi into the soil rhizosphere and impacts other organisms in the vicinity. Sorghum possesses vital allelopathic characteristics due to which it produces and releases different biomolecules from its root hairs, stems, and grains. Several studies have reported that sorghum acts as an allelopathic crop, decreasing the growth and eco-physiological attributes of surrounding plants and weeds growing simultaneously or subsequently in the field. Sorghum allelopathy has been exploited in the context of green manure, crop rotations, cover crops, and intercropping or mulching, whereas plant aqueous extracts or powder might be an alternate method of weed control. A diverse group of allelochemicals, including benzoic acid, p-hydroxybenzoic acid, vanillic acid, ferulic acid, chlorogenic acid, m-coumaric acid, p-coumaric acid, gallic acid, caffeic acid, p-hydroxibenzaldehyde, dhurrin, sorgoleone, m-hydroxybenzoic acid and protocatechuic acid, have been isolated and identified from different plant tissues of sorghum and root exudates. These allelochemicals, especially sorgoleone, have been investigated in terms of their mode(s) of action, specific activity and selectivity, release in the rhizosphere and uptake and translocation in sensitive species. The present review describes the importance of sorghum allelopathy as an ecological tool in managing weeds, highlighting the most recent advances in the allelochemicals present in sorghum, their modes of action, and their fate in the ecosystem. Further research should focus on the evaluation and selection of sorghum cultivars with high allelopathic potential, so that sorghum allelopathy can be better utilized for weed control and yield enhancement.

Climate change seriously impacts global agriculture, with rising temperatures directly affecting the yield. Vegetables are an essential part of daily human consumption and thus have importance among all agricultural crops. The human population is increasing daily, so there is a need for alternative ways which can be helpful in maximizing the harvestable yield of vegetables. The increase in temperature directly affects the plants’ biochemical and molecular processes; having a significant impact on quality and yield. Breeding for climate-resilient crops with good yields takes a long time and lots of breeding efforts. However, with the advent of new omics technologies, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, the efficiency and efficacy of unearthing information on pathways associated with high-temperature stress resilience has improved in many of the vegetable crops. Besides omics, the use of genomics-assisted breeding and new breeding approaches such as gene editing and speed breeding allow creation of modern vegetable cultivars that are more resilient to high temperatures. Collectively, these approaches will shorten the time to create and release novel vegetable varieties to meet growing demands for productivity and quality. This review discusses the effects of heat stress on vegetables and highlights recent research with a focus on how omics and genome editing can produce temperature-resilient vegetables more efficiently and faster.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract