Search Results for: plants stress

Author: Suter, Leonie; Widmer, Alex Description: Plants that can adapt their phenotype may be more likely to survive changing environmental conditions. Heritable epigenetic variation could provide a way to rapidly adapt to such changes. Here we tested whether environmental stress induces heritable, potentially adaptive phenotypic changes independent of genetic variation over few generations in Arabidopsis thaliana. We grew two accessions (Col-0, Sha-0) of A. thaliana for three generations under salt, heat and control conditions and tested for induced heritable phenotypic changes in the fourth generation (G4) and in reciprocal F1…

Author: Yeh, Ching-Hui; Kaplinsky, Nicholas J.; Hu, Catherine; Charng, Yee-Yung Description: Plants have evolved overlapping but distinct cellular responses to different aspects of high temperature stress. These responses include basal thermotolerance, short- and long-term acquired thermotolerance, and thermotolerance to moderately high temperatures. This ‘thermotolerance diversity’ means that multiple phenotypic assays are essential for fully describing the functions of genes involved in heat stress responses. A large number of genes with potential roles in heat stress responses have been identified using genetic screens and genome wide expression studies. We examine the…

Author: Myouga, Fumiyoshi; Motohashi, Reiko; Kuromori, Takashi; Nagata, Noriko; Shinozaki, Kazuo Description: Analysis of albino or pale-green (apg) mutants is important for identifying nuclear genes responsible for chloroplast development and pigment synthesis. We have identified 38 apg mutants by screening 11,000 Arabidopsis Ds-tagged lines. One mutant, apg6, contains a Ds insertion in a gene encoding APG6 (ClpB3), a homologue of the heat-shock protein Hsp101 (ClpB1). We isolated somatic revertants and identified two Ds-tagged and one T-DNA-tagged mutant alleles of apg6. All three alleles gave the same pale-green phenotype. These results…

Author: Liu, Junzhong; Feng, Lili; Li, Jianming; He, Zuhua Description: Plants have evolved sophisticated genetic and epigenetic regulatory systems to respond quickly to unfavorable environmental conditions such as heat, cold, drought, and pathogen infections. In particular, heat greatly affects plant growth and development, immunity and circadian rhythm, and poses a serious threat to the global food supply. According to temperatures exposing, heat can be usually classified as warm ambient temperature (about 22-27°C), high temperature (27-30°C) and extremely high temperature (37-42°C, also known as heat stress) for the model plant Arabidopsis…

Author: Ambrosone, Alfredo; Costa, Antonello; Leone, Antonella; Grillo, Stefania Description: RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) govern many aspects of RNA metabolism, including pre-mRNA processing, transport, stability/decay and translation. Although relatively few plant RNA-binding proteins have been characterized genetically and biochemically, more than 200 RBP genes have been predicted in Arabidopsis and rice genomes, suggesting that they might serve specific plant functions. Besides their role in normal cellular functions, RBPs are emerging also as an interesting class of proteins involved in a wide range of post-transcriptional regulatory events that are important in providing…

Author: Jensen, C. R.; Mogensen, V. O.; Mortensen, G.; Fieldsend, J. K.; Milford, G. F. J.; Andersen, M. N.; Thage, J. H. Description: The effect of soil drying on seed yield, oil, protein, and glucosinolate contents was studied in rape (Brassica napus. L) grown in sandy and loamy soils in lysimeters in the field. By controlling irrigation, the plants were exposed to early drought (ED) during the vegetative and the flowering stage or late drought (LD) during the pod filling stage. Under low evaporative demands (2-4 mm day-1) in 1991,…

Author: Zhou, Yeling; Van Leeuwen, Sanne K.; Pieterse, Corné M. J.; Bakker, Peter A. H. M.; Van Wees, Saskia C. M. Description: Climate change and the associated increase in atmospheric CO2 levels may affect the severity of plant diseases and threaten future crop yields. Here, we compared responses of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to leaf and root pathogens with hemi-biotrophic or necrotrophic infection strategies under pre-industrial, current, and future atmospheric CO2 conditions. Defenses against biotrophs are generally regulated by salicylic acid (SA) signaling, whereas jasmonic acid (JA) signaling controls…

Author: Burgess, L. H.; Handa, R. J. Description: The effect of estrogen (E) on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was investigated in female Sprague-Dawley rats. Animals were bilaterally ovariectomized (OVX), and a Silastic capsule (0.5 cm) containing 17 beta-estradiol was sc implanted. Control animals received a blank capsule. Animals were killed 21 days later. In E-treated rats, we found significantly higher corticosterone (CORT) peak levels 20 min after a 5-sec footshock (1.0 mamp) or exposure to ether vapors (P less than 0.05) compared to those in OVX controls. In addition, the recovery…