Abstract
Trees are constantly exposed to climate fluctuations, which vary with both time and geographic location. Environmental changes that are outside of the physiological favorable range usually negatively affect plant performance and trigger responses to abiotic stress. Long-living trees in particular have evolved a wide spectrum of molecular mechanisms to coordinate growth and development under stressful conditions, thus minimizing fitness costs. The ongoing development of techniques directed at quantifying abiotic stress has significantly increased our knowledge of physiological responses in woody plants. However, it is only within recent years that advances in next-generation sequencing and biochemical approaches have enabled us to begin to understand the complexity of the molecular systems that underlie these responses. Here, we review recent progress in our understanding of the molecular bases of drought and temperature stresses in trees, with a focus on functional, transcriptomic, epigenetic, and population genomic studies. In addition, we highlight topics that will contribute to progress in our understanding of the plastic and adaptive responses of woody plants to drought and temperature in a context of global climate change.
Highlights
Forests play a crucial role for the climate at various temporalspatial scales
We focus on studies based on transcriptomics, epigenomics, and population genomics that have mostly been carried out over the last decade, with the aim of discussing molecular mechanisms and the way in which they may contribute to tree responses to stress in a context of global climate change
Trees are facing rapid changes in temperature and precipitation (Joyce and Rehfeldt, 2013) that are affecting forest productivity, survival, and the distribution of species (Birdsey and Pan, 2011; Morin et al, 2018). In this context, gaining knowledge related to the molecular bases of responses to abiotic stress is an urgent requirement that will contribute to the detection, and potentially to the generation, of genotypes that are more resistant to abiotic stress
Summary
Forests play a crucial role for the climate at various temporalspatial scales. For example, forests directly affect the local climate by interacting with biogeochemical water cycles (Ellison et al, 2017) whilst at the same time influencing the global carbon cycle because they hold a large fraction of the global carbon stock, acting as a major sink for atmospheric CO2 (Pan et al, 2011). Illumina HiSeq 2000 Illumina HiSeq 2000 Illumina/Solexa GAIIx Illumina HiSeq 4000
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