This book collates various aspects of stress tolerance in crop plants. It primarily focuses on the heat and temperature related stress, starting from the severity of the problem on quantity and quality of yield under the threat of global climate change. The content also explores other mechanistic dimensions such as physiochemical and molecular mechanism underlying thermotolerance, signaling mechanism under heat stress, role of heat shock proteins in modulating thermotolerance, omics approach for development of climate smart-crop. Chapters discuss different approaches used in the past to develop heat stress tolerant crop plants, list of developed thermotolerant agriculturally important crop plants, redox homeostasis under heat stress, nutrient uptake and use efficiency in plants under heat stress and much more. The book is a useful compilation for researchers working in the area of abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants, as well as for students of plant physiology and agricultural sciences.

RNA interference (RNAi) is an evolutionarily conserved, homology dependent gene silencing mechanism; an area of upfront basic research, further gaining importance in applications like development of virus resistant transgenics. To explore the possibility of transgenic resistance to the Tomato leaf curl virus, a constraint in tomato production, sub-region of viral replicase gene (truncated rep) was chosen as target for RNA based silencing. In silico analysis of rep gene with siRNA design algorithms and appraisal of rep mRNA, disclosed potent siRNAs and the accessibility of mRNA for gene silencing. Four different RNAi constructs viz., antisense T-rep and three hairpin RNA constructs, were developed and tomato transformed to obtain transformants. Transformation and regeneration of ToLCV infected leaves resulted in regeneration of recovered plants. Interestingly, tomato transformants showed phenotypic anomalies, attributed to the off-target silencing by siRNAs. Thus the book caters to the plant molecular biologists and virologists working on the arena of gene silencing with information on basic criteria for target region selection, construct design strategies and silencing studies.