Transcriptional memory and response to adverse temperatures in plants

Abstract

Temperature is one of the major environmental signals controlling plant development, geographical distribution, and seasonal behavior. Plants perceive adverse temperatures, such as high, low, and freezing temperatures, as stressful signals that can cause physiological defects and even death. As sessile organisms, plants have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to adapt to recurring stressful environments through changing gene expression or transcriptional reprogramming. Transcriptional memory refers to the ability of primed plants to remember previously experienced stress and acquire enhanced tolerance to similar or different stresses. Epigenetic modifications mediate transcriptional memory and play a key role in adapting to adverse temperatures. Understanding the mechanisms of the formation, maintenance, and resetting of stress-induced transcriptional memory will not only enable us to understand why there is a trade-off between plant defense and growth, but also provide a theoretical basis for generating stress-tolerant crops optimized for future climate change. In this review, we summarize recent advances in dissecting the mechanisms of plant transcriptional memory in response to adverse temperatures, based mainly on studies of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We also discuss remaining questions that are important for further understanding the mechanisms of transcriptional memory during the adverse temperature response.

Fine-Tuning Cold Stress Response Through Regulated Cellular Abundance and Mechanistic Actions of Transcription Factors

“…In eukaryotes, chromatin is organized as repeating subunits called nucleosome consisting of 147 bp DNA wrapped around a histone octamer containing four different histone proteins, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 present in pairs. Loosening of the chromatin structure at a particular gene locus increases the accessibility of the transcriptional machinery and enhancing the transcriptional activity, which can be heritable and stably maintained between cell generations ( Xie et al, 2021b ). Histone acetyltransferase GENERAL CONTROL NON-REPRESSED PROTEIN5 (GCN5) catalyzes the acetylation of H3K9 and H3K14, which improves thermotolerance by activating heat stress-responsive genes, such as HEAT SHOCK TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR A3 (HSFA3), UV-HYPERSENSITIVE6 (UVH6), CHOLINE TRANSPORTER-LIKE 1 (CTL1), POLYGALACTURONASE INVOLVED IN EXPANSION3 (PGX3), and MYB54 ( Hu et al, 2015 ; Zheng et al, 2019 ).…”

“…It is a long-term effect that enables the plants to be protected from various stresses based on a previous encounter. In this process, the epigenetic modifications take place to mediate transcriptional memory, thus increasing plant adaptation to adverse temperatures ( Xie et al, 2021b ). As reported in Arabidopsis, the repetitive cold stress treatments reduced COR15A in resistance-improved plants.…”

Epigenetic stress memory: A new approach to study cold and heat stress responses in plants

“…The reduced H3K27me3 also promotes the expression of CORs and ATGOLS3. The schematic representation was adapted from (Xie et al, 2021) by adding additional information and created using BioRender.com.…”

“…Extreme temperatures, such as cold and heat in the wake of climate change, significantly impact plant productivity by affecting gene expression. Therefore, plants memorize a stressful experience for a certain period of time and use their stress memory, such as transcriptional, somatic, intergenerational and transgenerational stress memory to increase their survival, when they are exposed to such conditions a second time ( Xie et al., 2021 ; Brenya et al., 2022 ; Gallusci et al., 2022 ). Since plants do not have a brain, plant stress memory is completely different from human and animal memory.…”

Integrated metabolism and epigenetic modifications in the macrophages of mice in responses to cold stress

“…However, low temperature can negatively affect the body's immunity, resulting in increases in the incidence of viral flu, cough, cold, diarrhea, asthma, pneumonia, and other respiratory problems (Budhathoki and Zander, 2019). The number of deaths caused by low temperature in the future is unlikely to decrease, and the resulting health costs may reach one billion euros per year by 2100 (Díaz et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2021). Minimalization of the impact of cold stress should be highly valued.…”