抄録
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 highlights major strategies and representative applications of genome editing for heat tolerance, covering the enhancement of endogenous defense pathways, regulation of core transcription factors, and optimization of physiological and developmental processes. Furthermore, it evaluates the empowering potential of cutting-edge editing technologies—such as promoter engineering, multiplex gene editing, genome-wide screening libraries, base and prime editing, and epigenome editing—in enabling “precise design” of heat tolerance. Finally, considering challenges such as target discovery, editing efficiency, off-target control, trait trade-offs, and biosafety, it emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary integration and technological convergence in future research. This paper aims to establish a systematic framework linking “molecular mechanisms—editing strategies—technological innovation—application challenges,” thereby providing theoretical support and technical references for molecular design breeding of heat-tolerant crops.
