Heat Stress and Plant Resilience: Mechanisms, Memory and Strategies

Changing climate with higher temperatures are increasingly challenging plant growth and productivity, with consequences that cascade from cellular injury to yield instability and food-system risk. Inbuilt plant sensors recognize temperature shifts, reprogram transcription and translation, reshape metabolism, protect proteins and membranes, adjust development, and sometimes “remember” prior heat exposure to respond faster to recurrent events. The critical challenge now lies in translating these mechanistic insights into robust, integrative, and sustainable field-relevant strategies that safeguard crop yield and ecosystem services under an increasingly warming climate.This Research Topic aims to deepen our understanding of how plants perceive, respond to, and recover from heat stress across biological scales—from molecules, organelles, and single cells to tissues, whole plants, populations, and agroecosystems. We particularly encourage work that bridges laboratory discovery with realistic temperature regimes, including heatwaves, nocturnal warming, heat shock and compound stresses such as heat–drought or heat–salinity, to strengthen the relevance of findings for natural and agricultural settings. In parallel, we strongly welcome research centered on non-model plants—including commercial crop wild relatives, orphan/underutilized crops, extremophytes, and locally adapted species that thrive under chronic heat or other harsh environments—to uncover elite and/or unknown function genes and novel adaptive mechanisms. These systems represent an underexploited reservoir of thermotolerance alleles and can reveal novel regulatory logic and molecular innovations that may be missed when relying on a limited set of traditional model organisms. By uniting cutting-edge toolkits with diverse genetic resources, we aim to accelerate translation into climate-resilient plants and actionable strategies for breeding, biotechnology, and agricultural management.We welcome Original Research, Methods, Reviews, and Perspectives that advance understanding or translation of plant heat resilience. Studies in crops, horticultural species, trees, and non-model plants are all encouraged. Desired themes include: temperature sensing and signaling; HSF/HSP networks, chaperones, and proteostasis; thermomorphogenesis and developmental plasticity; reproductive heat tolerance and fertility; photosynthesis, respiration, stress granule biogenesis and source–sink dynamics; organelle crosstalk and redox control; hormone, RNA, and metabolite regulation; priming, memory, and resetting; natural variation, local adaptation, and quantitative genetics; microbiome-mediated thermotolerance; and breeding or engineering strategies. We welcome integrative studies using single-cell/spatial omics, epigenomics, gene editing, phenomics, modeling, QTL mapping, GWAS, and multi-omics integration. Topic editors: Anita Mann, John Paul Délano-Frier, Yang Tao, NITISH RANJAN PRAKASH Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77557/heat-stress-and-plant-resilience-mechanisms-memory-and-strategies