Nuclear factor-Y transcription factors in crops: Biological roles, regulation, and breeding applications.

Given the global challenges such as climate change and food security, crop species must develop sophisticated strategies to enhance phenotypic plasticity and stress resilience, thereby ensuring yield stability and environmental adaptability in agricultural practices. NF-Y transcription factors, which exist multiple paralogs and function as a trimeric complex, enable a vast number of combinations that likely serve pivotal regulatory functions in these processes. Over the past decade, research on NF-Y has notably shifted focus from the model plant Arabidopsis to crop species, yielding significant advances in our genetic and molecular understanding. However, comprehensive reviews on crop NF-Y remain absent. Here, we provide a systematic summary of the current knowledge of NF-Y in crops across multiple regulatory layers, emphasize the mechanisms underlying the assembly and disassembly of the NF-Y complex, and discuss the mechanistic functions of NF-Y in the epigenetic regulation of target genes. These mechanistic insights, combined with the diverse biological roles of NF-Y, establish a theoretical foundation for exploiting NF-Y in crop molecular breeding. Notably, we also discuss practical implementation strategies and potential challenges in translating NF-Y research into field applications. Collectively, this review provides significant insights into the function and regulation of crop NF-Y, offering valuable guidance for further research and the development of innovative strategies for crop improvement in the future molecular design breeding process.