Transgenerational Plant Immunity in Plant Disease Management

Abstract

Plants have the potentiality to transfer the message of threat to their offspring. Plants adopt such mechanisms probably due to the fact that the infants and the younger ones are particularly viewed to be vulnerable to the detrimental effects of the environment. Plants can pass on such messages to the next generation through their seeds. Parents use mostly three mechanisms that are present at disposal to the higher organisms to start and sustain the epigenetic gene regulation such as DNA methylation, histone modification, and RNA interference. Plants may be induced to bring out epigenetic modifications for their signature stress memories through a process known as “priming.” Priming can induce epigenetic modifications in plants to face both biotic and abiotic stresses and the same can be passed on to their modifications. Therefore, transgenerational epigenetics is seen as a future strategy to combat both biotic and abiotic stresses in plants.