Abstract
In some plants, exposure to stress can induce a memory response, which appears to play an important role in adaptation to recurrent stress environments. However, whether rice exhibits drought stress memory and the molecular mechanisms that might underlie this process have remained unclear. Here, we ensured that rice drought memory was established after cycles of mild drought and re-watering treatment, and studied gene expression by whole-transcriptome strand-specific RNA sequencing (ssRNA-seq). We detected 6,885 transcripts and 238 lncRNAs involved in the drought memory response, grouped into 16 distinct patterns. Notably, the identified genes of dosage memory generally did not respond to the initial drought treatment. Our results demonstrate that stress memory can be developed in rice under appropriate water deficient stress, and lncRNA, DNA methylation and endogenous phytohormones (especially abscisic acid) participate in rice short-term drought memory, possibly acting as memory factors to activate drought-related memory transcripts in pathways such as photosynthesis and proline biosynthesis, to respond to the subsequent stresses.
Highlights
Plants can experience recurrent environmental stresses throughout the whole life cycle (Avramova, 2015), and their responses to later instances of a stress often differ from the first response (Bruce et al, 2007; Ding et al, 2013)
To determine if abscisic acid (ABA) and jasmonic acid (JA) are involved in rice drought memory response, we measured the endogenous contents of these phytohormones from R0 to R4 (Figures 1B,C)
The different changes of JA and ABA after cycles of drought treatment indicated that rice drought memory responses possibly included maintaining homeostasis of endogenous JA and ABA levels
Summary
Plants can experience recurrent environmental stresses throughout the whole life cycle (Avramova, 2015), and their responses to later instances of a stress often differ from the first response (Bruce et al, 2007; Ding et al, 2013). Arabidopsis with over-expressed VaNAC26 showed increased drought tolerance via activating related genes in JA biosynthesis signaling pathway (Fang et al, 2016). These mechanisms were all verified in plant stress response
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