A mutant resource to unveil mechanisms underlying the high heat tolerance in sorghum. Sorghum bicolor

Sorghum, one of the most heat tolerant major crops, is an excellent model to study the complex heat stress response pathway with its compact genome structure. Here we report a collection of 75 sorghum heat sensitive (hs) mutants as a resource to study the molecular mechanisms of heat tolerance in crops. This core collection covered a variety of heat sensitive phenotypes in vegetative and reproductive tissues at different development stages. The sequencing efforts of the segregating mapping populations of each mutant provided potential candidate genes causing the heat sensitivity. Using the mutant collection, we characterized the important role of SbNRPE2c (the second largest subunit of one subtype RNA polymerase V ) in the responding to the high temperature during pollination.