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The Arabidopsis DNA methylome is relatively impervious to abiotic stress

ABSTRACT: Improving plant stress response holds great agricultural potential. One promising, yet speculative, possibility is the formation of plant stress memory facilitating enhanced responses to recurring stress. One possibility is the involvement of environmentally-induced variation in reversible chromatin marks, such as DNA methylation, leading to the altered regulation of underlying genetic elements that promote enhanced stress tolerance. Such potential has spurred numerous investigations yielding conflicting results, thus it remains unclear whether robust stress-induced chromatin variation can encode plant stress memory conveying enhanced stress tolerance. Herein we investigate for the possibility of stress-induced alterations in DNA methylation to convey stress memory, both on mitotic and transgenerational timescales, such that previously stressed plants show improved stress tolerance with correlated alterations in DNA methylation at stress-responsive loci. We find that although the experience of stress may be stored mitotically, it does not appear to be transmitted meiotically and is independent of DNA methylation changes. Overall, the DNA methylome appears to be robust against stress-induced variation and is unlikely to contribute to any form of stress memory.

ORGANISM(S): Arabidopsis thaliana

PROVIDER: GSE94075 | GEO | 2017/10/03

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA368978

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:Pre-exposure of plants to various abiotic conditions confers improved tolerance to subsequent stress. Mild drought acclimation induces acquired rapid desiccation tolerance (RDT) in the resurrection plant Boea hygrometrica, but the mechanisms underlying the priming and memory processes remain unclear. In this study, we demonstrated that drought acclimationinduced RDT can be maintained for at least four weeks but was completely erased after 18 weeks based on a combination of the phenotypic and physiological parameters. Global transcriptome analysis identified several RDT-specific rapid dehydration-responsive genes related to cytokinin and phospholipid biosynthesis, nitrogen and carbon metabolism, and epidermal morphogenesis, most of which were pre-induced by drought acclimation. Comparison of whole-genome DNA methylation revealed dehydration stress-responsive hypomethylation in the CG, CHG, and CHH contexts and acclimation-induced hypermethylation in the CHH context of the B. hygrometrica genome, consistent with the transcriptional changes in methylation pathway genes. As expected, the global promoter and gene body methylation levels were negatively correlated with gene expression levels in both acclimated and dehydrated plants but showed no association with transcriptional divergence during the procedure. Nevertheless, the promoter methylation variations in the CG and CHG contexts were significantly associated with the differential expression of genes required for fundamental genetic processes of DNA conformation, RNA splicing, translation, and post-translational protein modification during acclimation, growth, and rapid dehydration stress response. It was also associated with the dehydration stress-induced upregulation of memory genes, including pre-mRNA-splicing factor 38A, vacuolar amino acid transporter 1-like, and UDP-sugar pyrophosphorylase, which may contribute directly or indirectly to the improvement of dehydration tolerance in B. hygrometrica plants. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the potential implications of DNA methylation in dehydration stress memory and, therefore, provide a molecular basis for enhanced dehydration tolerance in plants induced by drought acclimation.

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The Arabidopsis DNA methylome is relatively impervious to abiotic stress

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