As global warming continues, reef-building corals could avoid local population declines through "genetic rescue" involving exchange of heat-tolerant genotypes across latitudes, but only if latitudinal variation in thermal tolerance is heritable. Here, we show an up-to-10-fold increase in odds of survival of coral larvae under heat stress when their parents come from a warmer lower-latitude loca...

High temperatures during cotton flowering and early boll development can detrimentally affect cotton yield. Current commercial cultivars do not have pronounced tolerance to elevated temperatures, and improved methods of screening for thermo-tolerance are needed. The effect of heat stress on cotton has been measured with several different methods including membrane leakage, chlorophyll fluoresce...

A field experiment was conducted with four wheat varieties Raj4134, HD2733, NW 1014 and K9006 for characterization of heat stress tolerance traits under heat stress condition. Heat stress was induced by delayed sowing of 35 days from normal date of sowing so that grain filling stage of wheat could experience severe heat stress. Data related to plant height, chlorophyll content, starch content a...

One of the greatest challenges to production dairy farmers in most part of the tropical country is heat stress and the strain that it causes the lactating dairy cow. Climatic conditions in the most parts of India are such that the warm (or hot) season is relatively long, there is intense radiant energy for an extended period of time and there is generally presence of high relative humidity. Thu...

1. Thermoregulation buffers environmental variation, which enables a species to persist during climate change but ultimately hinders adaptation of thermal tolerance by weakening selective pressure. 2. We used a model of optimal thermal physiology to demonstrate how thermoregulatory behaviour limits local adaptation of thermal physiology in a widespread group of lizards, the Sceloporus undulatus...

In organisms with complex life cycles, the adaptive value of thermotolerance depends on life-history timing and seasonal temperature profiles. We illustrate this concept by examining variation in annual thermal environments and thermal acclimation among four geographic populations of the pitcher plant mosquito. Only diapausing larvae experience winter, whereas both postdiapause and nondiapause ...

Plants are sessile organisms, and their ability to adapt to stress is crucial for survival in natural environments. Many observations suggest a relationship between stress tolerance and heat shock proteins (HSPs) in plants, but the roles of individual HSPs are poorly characterized. We report that transgenic Arabidopsis plants expressing less than usual amounts of HSP101, a result of either anti...

High temperature impedes the growth and productivity of various crop species. To date, rice (Oryza sativa L.) has not been exploited to understand the molecular basis of its abnormally high level of temperature tolerance. To identify transcripts induced by heat stress, twenty-day-old rice seedlings of different rice cultivars suffering from heat stress were treated at different times, and diffe...

We compared aspects of the thermal sensitivity of replicated lines of Drosophila melanogaster that had been evolving by laboratory natural selection at three selection temperatures: 16.5 degrees C (10+ yr), 25 degrees C (9+ yr), or 29 degrees C (4+ yr). The 16.5 degrees C and 25 degrees C lines are known to have diverged in fitness at 16.5 degrees C versus 25 degrees C and also in heat toleranc...

Common bean is adapted to relatively cool climatic conditions and temperatures of>30 Cduring the day or>20 C at night result in yield reduction. The long-term goal of breeding for heat tolerance is the development of germplasm with improved field level tolerance under variable temperature conditions. Using previously developed stress indices, this studypresents results fromhigh temperature scre...