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Decreased production of crops due to climate change has been predicted scientifically. While climate-resilient crops are necessary to ensure food security and support sustainable agriculture, predicting crop growth under future global warming is challenging. Therefore, we aimed to assess the impact of realistic global warming conditions on rice cultivation. We developed a crop evaluation platform, the agro-environment (AE) emulator, which generates diverse environments by implementing the complexity of natural environmental fluctuations in customized, fully artificial lighting growth chambers. We confirmed that the environmental responsiveness of rice obtained in the fluctuation of artificial environments is similar to those exhibited in natural environments by validating our AE emulator using publicly available meteorological data from multiple years at the same location and multiple locations in the same year. Based on the representative concentration pathway, real-time emulation of severe global warming unveiled dramatic advances in the rice life cycle, accompanied by a 35% decrease in grain yield and an 85% increase in quality deterioration, which is higher than the recently reported projections. The transcriptome dynamism showed that increasing temperature and CO2 concentrations synergistically changed the expression of various genes and strengthened the induction of flowering, heat stress adaptation, and CO2 response genes. The predicted severe global warming greatly alters rice environmental adaptability and negatively impacts rice production. Our findings offer innovative applications of artificial environments and insights for enhancing varietal potential and cultivation methods in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obligatory short-day plant, Perilla frutescens var. crispa was induced to flower under long-day conditions when grown under low-intensity light (30 µmol m−2 s−1). Plant size was smaller under lower light intensity, indicating that the low-intensity light acted as a stress factor. The phenomenon is categorized as stress-induced flowering. Low-intensity light treatment for 4 weeks induced 100% flowering. The plants responded to low-intensity light immediately after the cotyledons expanded, and the flowering response decreased with increasing plant age. The induced plants produced fertile seeds, and the progeny developed normally. The plants that flowered under low-intensity light had greener leaves. This greening was because of the decrease in anthocyanin content, and there was a negative correlation between the anthocyanin content and percent flowering. Treatment with L-2-aminooxy-3-phenylpropionic acid, an inhibitor of phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL), did not induce flowering under non-inductive light conditions and inhibited flowering under inductive low-intensity light conditions. The metabolic pathway regulated by PAL may be involved in the flowering induced by low-intensity light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flower-inducing effect of 5-azacytidine, a DNA demethylating reagent, was examined in several plant species with a stable or unstable photoperiodically induced flowering state under non-inductive photoperiodic conditions. The long day plant Silene armeria, whose flowering state is stable and the short day plant Pharbitis nil, whose flowering state is unstable were induced to flower by 5-azacytidine under a non-inductive condition. Thus, the replacement of photoinduction by 5-azacytidine treatment is not specific to Perilla frutescens. On the other hand, 5-azacytidine did not induce flowering in Xanthium strumarium whose flowering state is stable and Lemna paucicostata whose flowering state is unstable. Thus, epigenetics caused by DNA demethylation may be involved in the regulation of photoperiodic flowering irrespective of the stability of the photoperiodically induced flowering state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]