Cold Signaling and Cold Response in Plants

Abstract

Plants are constantly exposed to a variety of environmental stresses. Freezing or extremely low temperature constitutes a key factor influencing plant growth, development and crop productivity. Plants have evolved a mechanism to enhance tolerance to freezing during exposure to periods of low, but non-freezing temperatures. This phenomenon is called cold acclimation. During cold acclimation, plants develop several mechanisms to minimize potential damages caused by low temperature. Cold response is highly complex process that involves an array of physiological and biochemical modifications. Furthermore, alterations of the expression patterns of many genes, proteins and metabolites in response to cold stress have been reported. Recent studies demonstrate that post-transcriptional and post-translational regulations play a role in the regulation of cold signaling. In this review article, recent advances in cold stress signaling and tolerance are highlighted.

Advances in physiological and molecular aspects of plant cold tolerance

“…Nuclear Ca 2+ is increased after cold treatment and the maximum increase is delayed at 5-10 s compared to the peak of cytosolic calcium (Miura & Furumoto 2013). Mauger (2012) reported that the increase in nuclear Ca 2+ is caused by a nuclear envelope that is considered one of the major Ca 2+ stores.…”

“…Many coldregulated miRNAs have been recognized using bioinformatics, cloning and sequencing tools in different plant species (Zhou et al 2008;Zhang et al 2009;Lv et al 2010;Chen et al 2012). However, only a little is known about the mi target genes that are unregulated under the effect of low temperature (Miura & Furumoto 2013).…”

Overexpression of SIZ1 enhances tolerance to cold and salt stresses and attenuates response to abscisic acid in Arabidopsis thaliana

“…In Arabidopsis, the SIZ1-mediated sumoylation (at K393) of the MYC-type transcription factor ICE1 is required to activate cold signaling and freezing tolerance (Miura et al 2007b), and the introduction of an ICE1(K393R) variant protein represses the expression of cold-responsive genes and reduces freezing tolerance. ICE1-dependent cold signaling for cold acclimation is highly conserved among plants (Miura and Furumoto 2013). For example, the overexpression of tomato ICE1 enhances chilling tolerance and the accumulation of antioxidants, several amino acids, and sugars in red tomato fruits (Miura et al 2012a;Miura et al 2012b).…”

Cold hardening protects cereals from oxidative stress and necrotrophic fungal pathogenesis

“…Notably, cold acclimation in plants is a potent inducer of salicylic acid and ethylene accumulation [47][48][49][50], transcription factors [40], calcium signaling [51,52], pathogenesis-related and antifungal proteins [5] along with anatomical changes, and cell membrane or cytoskeleton restructuring [53]. Consequently, besides plant antioxidative systems several other host factors should be considered as potential mechanisms behind the observed resistance response in cold hardened barley challenged by infection with P. teres f. teres.…”