Differential submergence tolerance between juvenile and adult Arabidopsis plants involves the ANAC017 transcription factor

Abstract

Plants need to attune stress responses to the ongoing developmental programs to maximize their efficacy. For instance, successful submergence adaptation is often associated to a delicate poise between saving resources and their expenditure to activate measures that allow stress avoidance or attenuation. We observed a significant decrease in submergence tolerance associated with aging in Arabidopsis thaliana, with a critical step between two and three weeks of post-germination development. This sensitization to flooding was concomitant with the transition from juvenility to adulthood. Transcriptomic analyses indicated that a group of genes related to ABA and oxidative stress response was more expressed in juvenile plants than in adult ones. These genes are induced by endomembrane tethered ANAC factors that were in turn activated by submergence-associated oxidative stress. A combination of molecular, biochemical and genetic analyses showed that these genes are located in genomic regions that move towards a heterochromatic state with adulthood, as marked by lysine 4 dimethylation of histone H3. We concluded that, while the mechanism of flooding stress perception and signal transduction were unaltered between juvenile and adult phases, the sensitivity that these mechanisms set into action is integrated, via epigenetic regulation, into the developmental programme of the plant.

Oxidative signalling in seed germination and early seedling growth: an emerging role for ROS trafficking and inter-organelle communication

“…AOX1a enzyme is therefore not just a bio-marker for stress [2] that accumulates as a side effect, but it represents a key component of the reaction network that triggers subsequent cellular responses in response to respiratory deficiency. Interestingly, retrograde mitochondrial signalling pathways have been shown to play a key role in the acclimation and adaptation to flooding in Arabidopsis plants [59,60] an environmental condition affecting O 2 diffusion from the air into the soil and therefore respiration capacity [61]. How precisely the AOX1a enzyme induces the reprogramming remains to be elucidated, but one can imagine that especially under oxygen limitation high capacities of AOX1a activity could reduce alternative substrates, generating products that may serve as signalling molecules, such as nitric oxide [42].…”

MicroRNA775 and targetGalactosyltransferase(GALT9) module regulates recovery from submergence induced senescence by modulatingSAGsinArabidopsis thaliana

“…to successfully complete their life cycle under diverse environmental conditions (Kraehmer, 2016). Globally, the flood is one of the major stresses that lead to severe loss in crop yield and productivity (Ismail, 2018, Kumar and Dash, 2019, Bui et al ., 2020). Flooding stress is categorized into two categories depending upon the water exposure such as, complete submergence, and partial submergence.…”