Xingde Wang , Xiaoxi Zhou , Tianxia Guo

Institute of Life Sciences, Jiyang College, Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
Author    Correspondence author
Legume Genomics and Genetics, 2025, Vol. 16, No. 4   
Received: 15 Jun., 2025    Accepted: 31 Jul., 2025    Published: 20 Aug., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Heat stress is an important factor affecting the yield and adaptability of chickpeas, especially in the context of global climate change. To breed varieties that are both stress-resistant and high-yielding, it is necessary to conduct in-depth research on its heat-resistant molecular basis. This study reviewed the physiological and molecular responses of chickpeas at high temperatures, such as changes in photosynthetic efficiency, membrane stability, heat shock proteins (HSPs), and hormone signaling. Transcriptome studies have discovered many differentially expressed genes and regulatory networks; Proteomic and metabolomic analyses revealed that some stress-resistant related proteins, antioxidant substances, as well as metabolites such as proline and soluble sugars would accumulate at high temperatures. Genomic methods (such as QTL mapping and SNP analysis) have helped identify candidate gene loci, while the role of epigenetic modifications in heat tolerance responses has gradually been discovered. This study also presents a comparative case, conducting multi-omics analyses on heat-resistant and sensitive strains, demonstrating how to integrate the results to identify key candidate genes and metabolic pathways and apply them to the development of molecular markers. This study also systematically summarized the progress of multi-omics in the heat tolerance research of chickpeas, pointed out the difficulties faced in data integration, and proposed future research directions, which are expected to improve stress resistance in molecular design breeding and accelerate the breeding of heat-tolerant chickpea varieties.

Chickpea; Heat resistance; Multi-omics; Gene regulation; Molecular breeding