MCB Joint Seminar Series: Ravishankar Palanivelu "Beating the Heat: Understanding Plant Fertility to Engineer Heat-Resilient Crops"

Rising global temperatures threaten crop productivity by disrupting plant reproduction, a process essential for seed and fruit production. This seminar explores how understanding pollen–pistil interactions can guide the development of heat-resilient crops. Using Arabidopsis and tomato as complementary model systems, the seminar presents an integrated research program that reveals how fertilization fails under heat stress and how these failures can be mitigated. 

 

Systems-level approaches are uncovering the genetic and physiological foundations of reproductive thermotolerance. Genome-wide association mapping across diverse tomato varieties is identifying loci that enable pollen tubes (male tissues) to withstand elevated temperatures, while transcriptomic and physiological analyses of female tissues reveal that successful fertilization under heat stress depends on precise regulation of reactive oxygen species. In a complementary strategy, Arabidopsis is used for targeted engineering of a known pollen signaling pathway, demonstrating that introducing complementary proteins from tomato stabilizes pollen tube growth and restores fertilization under high temperatures. Together, this work illustrates how combining gene discovery with molecular engineering provides a powerful path toward climate-resilient agriculture.