Crucial plant processes under heat stress and tolerance through heat shock proteins

•Heat stress affects the crucial plant processes and functions.•Heat stress produces ROS, which damages the cell organelle and membrane stability.•Photosynthetic process, nutritional status and assimilate portioning considerable affected.•Heat shock protein works as chaperon and enhance heat tolerance Global crop production is facing a myriad of challenges and obstacles to achieving food security in the near future. Among all the challenges, heat stress (HS) is one of them. In HS, the temperature is a prime factor responsible for affecting the optimum growth of plants. Higher temperatures lead to changes in plants' functional processes and negatively affect plant productivity. In most plants, the reproductive stage is the sensible one and is greatly hampered by HS. However, some of the mechanisms were developed to mitigate the drastic impacts of HS. Although, there is a massive gap in achieving the sustainability goal under the climate change scenario. By considering these facts, the present analysis deals with the impact of HS on vital processes such as water and nutritional status, assimilate partitioning, photosynthetic activity, yield, and oxidative damages. This review further discussed the molecular mechanisms of heat shock proteins (HSPs) including sHSPs, HSP60, HSP70, HSP90, and HSP100 in HS tolerance. This review also highlights the advanced molecular techniques such as genome editing, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), and omics that open exciting avenues in several directions related to heat stress tolerance mechanisms. Further, this gathered information helps in the understanding of recent advances in HS tolerance through HSPs, which could used in developing future strategies for warming temperatures. Moreover, this information supports the crop breeding program for developing high-temperature tolerant lines.