Stress-Induced Cell Reprogramming. A Role for Global Genome Regulation?

Abstract

Virtual Biology Aims to Mimic Stress Reactions in Plants and Needs Adequate DataStress adaptation in crops is an important and timely topic in basic and applied biology. Interest in the issue is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is fascinating to understand interaction between plants and environment. On the other hand and in view of the needs of human life, we want to create crop plants that are able to confront successfully unfavorable natural conditions. The main goal in plant breeding is to obtain plants that combine high yields and reliable yield stability over years and locations. Simultaneously, plant products must have a high quality in terms of nutritional value, if used as food or feed, and/ or of other characteristics of commercial interests. However, in addition to biotic stress factors, disturbances of extreme or even mild abiotic stress are supposed to account for a high amount of unachieved potential in plant production all over the world. Diverse forms of abiotic stress may occur, including drought, heat, cold and freezing, salinity, nutrient deficiency, toxic concentration of heavy metals, oxidative stress as well as oxygen shortage, and mechanical stress. Although it is known that diverse environmental stress factors never act alone, experimental study of plant responses on abiotic stress is normally restricted to plant reactions on isolated stress factors. However, it has to be considered that stress always occurs as a complex of various interacting environmental factors that contribute in varying degrees to the overall stress. Consequently, plants always respond to a unique complex of growth conditions. Stress inducers from the abiotic as well as biotic world have some common signal and response pathways in plants and thereby have the potential to modulate the effect of each other through cross-talking. Further, plants, as sessile organisms, have to get along with the dynamics of transiently changing environmental conditions, and this has to be achieved at the various stages of plant development (see Amzallag, 2001, for the meaning of developmental windows in stress adaptation).Virtual experimentation is currently thought to offer the best potential for future research on stress adaptation because the complexity of plant reactions and stress factors may be taken into account simultaneously. Therefore, a global, multidisciplinary initiative to establish systems biology in plant sciences is very promising. Systems biology aims to collect and manage the huge amount of data available at any level of plant life to enable modeling of an artificial plant organism, the in silico plant. Confronting the artificial plant by computer simulation with real-life obstacles, such as abiotic stress through nutrient depletion or water deficit, will help to improve our understanding of how plants work and how to improve the capacity of plants in terms of increased ''fitness for stress.'' Combining computational skill and interest in natural sciences to the benefit of humanity, environment, and remunerative intersect...

Identification of Putative Stage-Specific Grapevine Berry Biomarkers and Omics Data Integration into Networks

“…The interaction between transcripts and proteins whose abundance increases during ripening and withering (Supplemental Data Sets S1 and S5, respectively) is shown in Figure 5A, highlighting the role of stress response genes and proteins as described previously (Arnholdt-Schmitt, 2004;Sarnowski et al, 2005). The network links the expression of genes for a DNA-directed RNA polymerase (TC62354), a mitochondrial PPR protein (TC62844), an auxin response gene (TC71124), and a b-1-3-galactosyl-O-glycosylglycoprotein (TC57705) to an unidentified protein (1420) and an osmotin-like protein (1393).…”

Chromatin remodeling in plant development

“…Responses to abiotic stress require the modulation of gene expression, which is also mediated by the alteration of chromatin structure (Arnholdt-Schmitt, 2004). One basic response of plants to environmental stress is the establishment of a temporary growth arrest that allows adaptation to adverse conditions and AtCHR12 SNF2/Brahma-type ATPase seem to play a vital role in mediating this response (Mlynarova et al, 2007; Table I).…”

Multiple exposures to drought 'train' transcriptional responses in Arabidopsis

“…P lants' responses to abiotic stresses involve coordinated actions to change cellular physiology and gene expression patterns 1 . A previous exposure to a stress may alter a plant's subsequent stress response by producing faster and/or stronger reactions that may provide the benefits of enhanced protection 2,3 .…”