Comprehensive Understanding of Selecting Traits for Heat Tolerance during Vegetative and Reproductive Growth Stages in Tomato

Abstract

Climate change is an important emerging issue worldwide; the surface temperature of the earth is anticipated to increase by 0.3 °C in every decade. This elevated temperature causes an adverse impact of heat stress (HS) on vegetable crops; this has been considered as a crucial limiting factor for global food security as well as crop production. In tomato plants, HS also causes changes in physiological, morphological, biochemical, and molecular responses during all vegetative and reproductive growth stages, resulting in poor fruit quality and low yield. Thus, to select genotypes and develop tomato cultivars with heat tolerance, feasible and reliable screening strategies are required that can be adopted in breeding programs in both open-field and greenhouse conditions. In this review, we discuss previous and recent studies describing attempts to screen heat-tolerant tomato genotypes under HS that have adopted different HS regimes and threshold temperatures, and the association of heat tolerance with physiological and biochemical traits during vegetative and reproductive growth stages. In addition, we examined the wide variety of parameters to evaluate the tomato’s tolerance to HS, including vegetative growth, such as leaf growth parameters, plant height and stem, as well as reproductive growth in terms of flower number, fruit set and yield, and pollen and ovule development, thereby proposing strategies for the development of heat-tolerant tomato cultivars in response to high temperature.