Abstract
Plants overcome the changing environmental conditions through diverse strategies and complex regulations. In addition to direct regulation of gene transcription, alternative splicing (AS) also acts as a crucial regulatory mechanism to cope with various stresses. Generating from the same pre-mRNA, AS events allow rapid adjustment of the abundance and function of key stress-response components. Mounting evidence has indicated the close link between AS and plant stress response. However, the mechanisms on how environmental stresses trigger AS are far from understood. The advancing high-throughput sequencing technologies have been providing useful information, whereas genetic approaches have also yielded remarkable phenotypic evidence for AS control of stress responses. It is important to study how stresses trigger AS events for both fundamental science and applications. We review current understanding of stress-responsive AS in plants and discuss research challenges for the near future, including regulation of splicing factors, epigenetic modifications, the shared targets of splice isoforms, and the stress-adjusting ratios between splicing variants.
Highlights
Since RNA splicing was initially discovered in 1977, this process of removing introns from premRNA has been observed in most eukaryotic cells (Berget et al, 1977)
Evidence has indicated that alternative splicing (AS), acting as a crucial regulatory mechanism in response to various stresses, is fast and efficient, and this may have an evolutionary advantage for plants to survive under rapidly changing environments
Splice variants participate in different pathways, they do have something in common: (1) alternatively spliced transcripts tend to encode truncated proteins that interact with the same targets; and (2) the ratios of splice variants are critical in the regulation of stress response pathways
Summary
Since RNA splicing was initially discovered in 1977, this process of removing introns from premRNA has been observed in most eukaryotic cells (Berget et al, 1977). In response to changing environmental conditions, alternative mature transcripts from the same pre-mRNA can be generated rapidly by choosing different splicing sites (Laloum et al, 2018). AS patterns can be altered directly by splicing factors or epigenetic changes, here we will review current studies on how stresses control AS through these mechanisms in plants.
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