SFB 973: Priming and Memory of Organismic Responses to Stress

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Being well prepared for the future – this strategy leads to successful performance at imminent stressful conditions if the investment in preparation is not too costly. Organisms have evolved several strategies to get ready for coping with environmental stress. Among these strategies, priming refers to preparation for impending stress by responding to an environmental (alarm) cue. The primed organism is expected to show improved responses to subsequent stress. This phenotypic adjustment to impending stress needs memory of the priming cue if a subsequent stress does not immediately follow. CRC 973 focuses on priming and memory of responses to stress in organisms without nervous systems, i.e. in bacteria, fungi and plants. We expose these organisms to temperature stress (project area A), to insect infestation (project area B), and to various stressors (project area C). The broad range of stressors allows us to search for common and stressor-specific patterns of priming and memory mechanisms and effects. The tight co-work of the biological subdisciplines involved in CRC 973 enables us to gain deep insights into the regulatory mechanisms and ecology of priming and memory of organismic responses to stress. Studies of common hypotheses and our common, overarching experimental design will merge the various perspectives of the participating projects into a comprehensive picture of results. In CRC 973 phase III, we aim to corroborate our findings and to deepen our insights in the regulatory mechanisms and ecological complexity of priming processes. Our studies on the regulatory mechanisms of priming will address stressor (un)specificity (i) by analysing how the detected key regulators behave in response to different stressors, i.e. in trans-priming processes, (ii) by modelling approaches, and (iii) by comparative statistical analyses using our common database, PrimeDB. In addition to the priming processes studied so far in phase I and II of CRC 973 (chromatin modifications, transcriptional, posttranslational, metabolic changes), we will include in phase III also the regulation by alternative splicing, ribosome biogenesis and translation. Our studies on the ecological effects of priming will address the robustness of the benefits of priming in a complex environment, where organisms do not only respond to a single priming cue and subsequent stress, but need to cope with multiple stressors. Furthermore, we will investigate whether life style traits of organisms (e.g. longevity, reproductive capacity) can be linked to distinct regulatory priming processes rather than to the duration of memory (as suggested in phase I). This will be investigated by comparing priming in a unicellular algal species with priming in seed plants and by comparisons across various plant species and Arabidopsis thaliana accessions.