Abstract
Improvement of crop climate resilience will require an understanding of whole-plant adaptation to specific local environments. This review places features of plant form and function related to photosynthetic productivity, as well as associated gene-expression patterns, into the context of the adaptation of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes to local environments with different climates in Sweden and Italy. The growth of plants under common cool conditions resulted in a proportionally greater emphasis on the maintenance of photosynthetic activity in the Swedish ecotype. This is compared to a greater emphasis on downregulation of light-harvesting antenna size and upregulation of a host of antioxidant enzymes in the Italian ecotype under these conditions. This differential response is discussed in the context of the climatic patterns of the ecotypes’ native habitats with substantial opportunity for photosynthetic productivity under mild temperatures in Italy but not in Sweden. The Swedish ecotype’s response is likened to pushing forward at full speed with productivity under low temperature versus the Italian ecotype’s response of staying safe from harm (maintaining redox homeostasis) while letting productivity decline when temperatures are transiently cold. It is concluded that either strategy can offer directions for the development of climate-resilient crops for specific locations of cultivation.
Highlights
A different suite of traits exhibited the opposite pattern—greater upregulation of genes that have functions in reactive oxygen species (ROS) detoxification in IT versus SW for comparison of plants grown under low light and warm temperature (LLW) versus high light and cool temperature (HLC) [52]
Figure down- or up-regulation in plants grown under HLC compared to LLW [52]
IT exhibited significant downregulation of its light-harvesting antenna size and a proportionally greater upregulation of a broad range of enzymatic antioxidation processes that counter oxidative stress under HLC compared to LLW
Summary
The need to develop “climate-resilient crops for improving global food security and safety” is intensifying [1] as extreme weather events become more common, with greater heat in the summer, more frequent and lasting droughts that can extend through more than one season, as well as late-spring/early-fall cold spells [2]. Plant acclimation to low growth temperature involves the development of new leaves with greater maximal photosynthetic capacity as a result of greater levels of photosynthetic protein [12,13,14] and presumably transport proteins Such a corresponding increase in the number of sugar-export proteins was proposed to take place in winter annuals during acclimation to cool temperature [15]. 12–16 ◦ C) with either moderate or high PFD, much greater (up to four times higher) rates of photosynthesis measured under 12.5 ◦ C were exhibited [16] This acclimation involved a major infrastructural change at the leaf level, with thicker leaves containing additional layers of chloroplast-rich palisade cells [16,17,18], as is seen in other herbaceous species that are active during the winter [16,19,20,21,22]. Summer annuals exhibit neither pronounced photosynthetic upregulation nor an increase in palisade layer number or larger minor veins when grown under cool versus warm temperatures [16]
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