Abstract
Climate adaptation through phenotypic innovation will become the main challenge for plants during global warming. Plants exhibit a plethora of mechanisms to achieve environmental and developmental plasticity by inducing dynamic alterations of gene regulation and by maximizing natural variation through large population sizes. While successful over long evolutionary time scales, most of these mechanisms lack the short-term adaptive responsiveness that global warming will require. Here, we review our current understanding of the epigenetic regulation of plant genomes, with a focus on stress-response mechanisms and transgenerational inheritance. Field and laboratory-scale experiments on plants exposed to stress have revealed a multitude of temporally controlled, mechanistic strategies integrating both genetic and epigenetic changes on the genome level. We analyze inter- and intra-species population diversity to discuss how methylome differences and transposon activation can be harnessed for short-term adaptive efforts to shape co-evolving traits in response to qualitatively new climate conditions and environmental stress.
Highlights
Plants grow in a variety of climatic conditions around the world, which we largely attribute to an adaptive genome that evolves over long periods of geological time
We focus on co-evolving traits and cooccurring stress response mechanisms to overcome the limited view of uncoupled stress variables
We examine the various outcomes of the interplay between epigenetic, genetic and physiological regulatory networks by first reviewing our current understanding of stress response mechanisms in plants and providing future perspectives and applications within the epigenetics and plant engineering fields
Summary
Plants grow in a variety of climatic conditions around the world, which we largely attribute to an adaptive genome that evolves over long periods of geological time. While large-scale sequencing of 1001 phenotypically distinct strains in A. thaliana has revealed significant differences in population structure (Kawakatsu et al, 2016), it has brought to light how gene expression, regulatory marks, and repetitive elements can optimally organize their interactions to enable fitness under diverse climatic conditions around the world. This has paved the way for research on strain-level differences across other plant species, such as agriculturally important crops, especially in the light of climate change dependent domestication. Being aware of the distinct TE families and their respective activation cues in each strain or species may be vital for determining competitive TE interactions during hybrid generation and cross-breeding
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