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

Given global challenges such as climate change and food insecurity, crop species must adopt sophisticated strategies to enhance phenotypic plasticity and stress resilience, thereby ensuring yield stability and environmental adaptability in agricultural systems. Nuclear factor-Y (NF-Y) transcription factors, which exist in multiple paralogs and function as a trimeric complex, enable numerous possible combinations that likely perform key regulatory functions in these processes. Over the past decade, research on NF-Y has notably expanded from the model plant Arabidopsis to various crop species, leading to major advances in genetic and molecular understanding. However, no comprehensive review has focused on crop NF-Y. Here, we present a systematic overview of current knowledge on NF-Y in crops across multiple regulatory layers, emphasizing the mechanisms underlying the assembly and disassembly of the NF-Y complex and its mechanistic roles in the epigenetic regulation of target genes. These mechanistic insights, together with the diverse biological functions of NF-Y, establish a theoretical foundation for exploiting NF-Y in molecular crop breeding. We also discuss practical strategies and potential obstacles in applying NF-Y research to field conditions. Collectively, this review offers valuable insights into the function and regulation of crop NF-Y, providing guidance for future research and the development of innovative strategies in molecular design breeding processes.