Advances in transcriptome-based analyses of cold response and signaling pathways of plants

Abstract

Low temperature is one of the most important environmental factors limiting plant growth, development, and distribution. Moreover, cold stress can always lead to impaired growth, mal-development, or even physiological imbalance in plants. On the brighter side, plants have evolved a number of adaptive mechanisms to resist cold depending upon the activation of molecular networks involved in stress perception, signal transcription and transduction, expression of specific stress-related genes, and physiological reaction of tolerance. Research related to plant cold response performed over the last few years has made significant achievements in the molecular, physiology, and phenology aspects. Genome-wide analyses have dramatically improved the efficiency of gene discovery. With the development of omics-based technology, including transcriptome and protein mass spectrometry, large-scale transcriptome data has become available in both model and non-model species. This paper uses transcriptome-based analyses of cold response and signaling pathways in Lilium lancifolium as an example, in combination with the latest studies in other plants, focusing on the molecular aspects of cold stress adaptive mechanisms. It attempts to highlight the major findings in response to cold stress factors from transcriptome-based analyses, and provides a tentative signaling regulatory pathway.