Epigenetic regulation of transgenerational response

植物不断地暴露在温度(热、冷)、水(干旱、洪水)、盐分和各种病原体(包括病毒、真菌和细菌)的胁迫下。植物是跑不掉的，必须时刻面对和应对危险。与此同时，植物因其惊人的适应和适应能力而成为最成功的高等真核生物之一。他们怎么做到这一点的？ 我实验室的研究旨在了解植物如何承受压力，以及它们如何适应新的环境条件。我们认为，植物应对高水平逆境和快速适应的能力强烈依赖于表观遗传调节机制。与考虑DNA永久不可逆变化的遗传学不同，表观遗传学是关于DNA和染色质(与蛋白质相关的DNA)的灵活可逆变化。表观遗传变化不会导致突变，而且在体细胞组织和后代中可以逆转。 我们实验室最近的研究表明，与在正常条件下生长的植物的后代相比，暴露在各种非生物和生物胁迫下的植物的后代获得了相当强的耐受更高水平的胁迫的能力。这表明，受到压力的植物能够将压力暴露的记忆传递给后代。我们已经证明，这种能力需要DNA甲基化，即胞嘧啶核苷酸的可逆化学修饰。这个项目旨在了解在这种跨代反应中还有哪些表观遗传学成分。我们的目标是找出压力记忆能持续多久，以及压力耐受性有多广。我们相信，我们的项目将使我们能够识别压力适应调节的分子表观遗传机制。该项目获得的结果可以用于农业，在不使用转基因方法的情况下培育更耐寒的作物。

Plants are constantly exposed to stresses such as temperature (heat, cold), water (drought, flood), salinity and various pathogens, including viruses, fungi and bacteria. Plants can not run away and have to face and cope with the danger at all times. At the same time, plants are among the most successful higher eukaryotes due to their amazing acclimation and adaptation capacities. How do they do this? The research in my lab is directed towards understanding of how plants withstand stress and how do they adapt to new environmental conditions. We believe that plant's ability to cope with high level of stress and quickly acclimate is strongly dependent on the mechanisms of epigenetic regulation. In contrast to genetics that takes into consideration permanent irreversible changes to DNA called mutations, epigenetics is about flexible reversible changes to DNA and chromatin (DNA associated with proteins). Epigenetic changes do not lead to mutations and can be reversed in somatic tissues and in the progeny. Recent studies in our lab demonstrated that the progeny of plants exposed to various abiotic and biotic stresses acquire substantial ability to tolerate higher levels of stress, as compared to the progeny of plants grown at normal conditions. This suggests that stressed plants are able to pass the memory of stress exposure to the progeny. We have shown that this ability requires DNA methylation, reversible chemical modifications at cytosine nucleotides. This project is directed towards understanding what are the other epigenetic components involved in this transgenerational response. We aim to find out how long the stress memory lasts and how broad the stress tolerance is. We believe that our project will allow to identify molecular epigenetic mechanisms of regulation of stress adaptation. The results obtained from this project could be used in agriculture for generation of hardier crops without using transgenic approaches.