Warm and cold parental reproductive environments affect seed properties, fitness, and cold responsiveness in Arabidopsis thaliana progenies

Abstract

Conditions in the parental environment during reproduction can affect the performance of the progenies. The goals of this study were to investigate whether warm or cold temperatures in the parental environment during flowering and seed development affect Arabidopsis thaliana seed properties, growth performance, reproduction and stress tolerance of the progenies, and to find candidate genes for progeny-related differences in stress responsiveness. Parental plants were raised at 20°C and maintained from bolting to seed maturity at warm (25°C) or cold (15°C) temperatures. Analysis of seed properties revealed significant increases in nitrogen in seeds from warm temperature and significant increases in lipids and in the ratio of a-linolenic to oleic acid in seeds from the cold parental environment. Progenies of the warm parental environment showed faster germination rates, faster root elongation growth, higher leaf biomass and increased seed production at various temperatures compared with those from the cold parental environment. This indicates that under stable environmental conditions, progenies from warm parental environments had a clear adaptive advantage over those from cold parental environments. This parental effect was presumably transmitted by the higher nitrogen content of the seeds developed in warm conditions. When offspring from parents grown at different temperatures were exposed to chilling or freezing stress, photosynthetic yield recovered faster in progenies originating from cold parental environments. Cold acclimation involved up-regulation of transcripts of flavanone 3-hydroxylase (F3H) and pseudo response regulator 9 (PRR9) and down-regulation of growth-associated transcription factors (TFs) NAP and AP2 domain containing RAP2.3. NAP, a regulator of senescence, and PRR9, a temperature-sensitive modulator of the circadian clock, were probably involved in mediating parent-of-origin effects, because they showed progenyrelated expression differences under chilling. Because low temperatures also delay senescence, cold responsiveness of NAP suggests that this factor is linked with the regulatory network that is important for environmental acclimation of plants.

Tobacco Mosaic Virus Infection Results in an Increase in Recombination Frequency and Resistance to Viral, Bacterial, and Fungal Pathogens in the Progeny of Infected Tobacco Plants

“…Similar findings have recently been reported for Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana; Blodner et al, 2007). There has been demonstrated the effect of temperature treatment memory on subsequent bud set and height growth in P. abies during somatic embryogenesis, thereby eliminating the influence of maternal effects per se (Kvaalen and Johnsen, 2008).…”

Transcriptional Regulation of Arabidopsis LEAFY COTYLEDON2 Involves RLE, a cis-Element That Regulates Trimethylation of Histone H3 at Lysine-27

“…The detection of GUS activity in vegetative tissues is not totally unexpected. Indeed, it may be related to the environmental regulation of F3H (Pelletier and Shirley, 1996;Blö dner et al, 2007;Dubos et al, 2008;Zhang et al, 2011) and to counteracting chromatin-based regulation Schmitges et al, 2011). Consistent with this hypothesis, genome-wide analyses showed that in seedlings the F3H endogenous locus is largely enriched in H3K4me3, a mark usually associated with transcriptionally active chromatin .…”

Evolutionary and Ecological Responses to Anthropogenic Climate Change

“…Although empirical studies have only begun to investigate the link between epigenetic inheritance and environmental change, we know that increased temperatures can have positive transgenerational effects on germination rates, biomass, seed production, and thermal tolerance (Blödner et al, 2007). Theoretical work suggests that epigenetic inheritance can reduce lag times associated with within-generation plastic responses to environmental cues (Bonduriansky et al, 2012) and can introduce novel heritable phenotypic variation into populations with little genetic diversity (Pál and Miklós, 1999).…”