Immediate and Transgenerational Regulation of Plant Stress Response through DNA Methylation

Abstract

Epigenetics refers to the heritable changes in gene activity without altering the DNA sequence. DNA methylation along with other epigenetic mechanisms is involved in the chromatin remodeling. This remodeling, especially in plants, plays an important role in the activation or silencing of specific genes as well as other genomic regions in response to the developmental and environmental clues. Environmental clues, biotic and abiotic stresses trigger the shift in the site specific as well as genome wide DNA methylation patterns which influences the plant response to these situations through gene regulation. Therefore, it is of prime importance to analyze variation in the DNA methylation pattern under stress conditions. This review summarizes the topic of DNA methylation by providing the basic/conceptual knowledge and some cases of DNA methylation shift due to stresses.

Towards the Understanding of Important Coconut Endosperm Phenotypes: Is there an Epigenetic Control?

“…Such changes include paramutations, transgene silencing, genome imprinting and transposon inactivation that are widespread in plants [106]. These changes are highly dynamic and transitory throughout the development of an organism and are mitotically and/or meiotically transmissible [107][108][109][110][111]. Histone modifications such as methylation, acetylation and sumoylation, and remodeling of the chromatin structure [112] result in either gene activation or silencing ultimately affecting processes such as plant development [109,113].…”

“…Methylated cytosines are seen in major eukaryote groups such as plants, fungi and animals [110]. In plants, DNA methylation occurs at CG, CHG and CHH sites [106,115,116].…”

“…In plants, DNA methylation occurs at CG, CHG and CHH sites [106,115,116]. In the Arabidopsis plant model system, cytosine methylation is typically found at the symmetric methylation sites of CG (24%) and CHG (6-7%) sites and at the asymmetric CHH sites (1.7%), where H is a non-G DNA base [106,110,[116][117][118]. CG and CHH methylation are more prevalent in euchromatic regions whereas CHG methylation is usually found in pericentromeric regions [116].…”

Small RNAs in Plant Responses to Abiotic Stresses: Regulatory Roles and Study Methods

“…There are extensive studies showing the relationships between DNA methylation and abiotic stresses [ 21 ]. It was shown that the decrease in the salt tolerance capability of Arabidopsis coincided with the blocking of DNA methylation at cytosine by 5-azacytidine treatment [ 22 ].…”