Molecular Basis of Plant Cold Acclimation: Insights Gained from Studying the CBF Cold Response Pathway

作者：Michael F. Thomashow · 发表于：PLANT PHYSIOLOGY · 年份：2010 · DOI：10.1104/pp.110.161794 · 被引用次数：793 · 研究领域：Plant Stress Responses and Tolerance、Plant responses to elevated CO2、Photosynthetic Processes and Mechanisms

For the 75th Anniversary Issue of Plant Physiology, I contributed an article (Thomashow, 2001) in which I highlighted recent advances in the identification of genes with roles in cold acclimation: the process whereby certain plants increase in freezing tolerance in response to low nonfreezing temperatures. At that time, about 20 Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) genes had been identified as cold regulated, and it seemed that it might be relatively easy to model the low-temperature transcriptional regulatory network. Since then, largely through the development and use of microarrays and other genomic tools, we have learned that exposing plants to low temperature triggers a highly complex regulatory program that results in extensive reorganization of the transcriptome. These changes include up- and down-regulation of hundreds of genes occurring in waves with time of incubating plants at low temperature (Fowler and Thomashow, 2002; Maruyama et al., 2004; Hannah et al., 2005; Vogel et al., 2005; Oono et al., 2006; Kilian et al., 2007; Robinson and Parkin, 2008). A hierarchical cluster analysis of the transcriptome data of Kilian et al. (2007) clearly reveals these features (Fig. 1A) and provokes a number of fundamental questions. How do plants sense low temperature; that is, what is the nature of the low-temperature thermometer? How is this information processed to activate the first wave of cold-regulated genes? What is the regulatory logic that underlies the cascading pattern ...