Epigenetic regulation of transgenerational response

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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.