Molecular mechanism of the impact of environmental stress on plant flowering
All living organisms are under continuous stress of one kind or more because the surrounding environment in which they live is dynamic. In a way, the essence of evolution lies in the incorporation of opportunistic changes that enable populations to survive in the stressful environment. Plants being...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Zhejiang University Press
2016-05-01
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| Series: | 浙江大学学报. 农业与生命科学版 |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.academax.com/doi/10.3785/j.issn.1008-9209.2015.11.291 |
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| Summary: | All living organisms are under continuous stress of one kind or more because the surrounding environment in which they live is dynamic. In a way, the essence of evolution lies in the incorporation of opportunistic changes that enable populations to survive in the stressful environment. Plants being sessile face various extreme environmental conditions throughout their life cycle and respond accordingly to maintain their vital metabolic homeostasis by regulating their gene activity. In addition, plants have developed excellent mechanisms of stress perception and signal transduction. Abiotic stresses affect the plant growth and yield potential, and therefore the response of plants to them is important for plants to cope with the environmental changes to survive. Plants can detect the environmental condition change and alter the developmental mode to obtain survival chances in the adversity. Several abiotic stresses affect plant growth and productivity with differential regulations at different levels. Therefore, any stimulus can trigger relative gene expression and lead to the physiological changes. These signal transduction pathways act independently and also have a significant crosstalk among them.When to initiate flowering is obviously a critical step in the plant life cycle, especially under an unfavorable environment. Under the control of a complex genetic network, plants detect and integrate external (such as photoperiod and temperature) and/or endogenous (such as age and hormone level) signals to induce or suppress flowering. Generally, the transition from a vegetative phase to a reproductive phase is controlled by some pathways, which integrate the plant endogenous developmental state and environmental cues. At last, the pathways converge to a small number of genes referred to as “floral pathway node”, such as GI (gigantea), FLC (flowering locus T), FT (flowering locus T) and SOC1 (suppressor of overexpression of Constans 1). These genes are not only involved in the flowering pathways, but also take part in many other metabolism pathways.There are many different biochemical pathways responsible for abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Many plants may regulate the flowering time under stress, so the adaptability change of flowering time reflects the need of plants to fructify under optimum conditions. There must be tightly connection between environmental stresses and plant flowering time, so we introduced the effects of the environmental stresses, such as light, temperature, water, salt, and nutrition, on plant flowering time. On the point of molecular biology, these processes refer to genetic and epigenetic changes. In the first part, the impacts of light stresses, including light intensity, light quality and photoperiod, on plant flowering time were introduced in details. The second part was about how plants alter the flowering time under different temperature stresses. Then, we briefly disscussed the influences of water stress, salt stress and nutrition stress on the flowering time. Last but not the least, some conclusion was made on the interaction between the environmental stress and the plant flowering time. In addition, the prospect section gave some suggestions on how to make use of stresses on flowering time and how to study the underlying mechanisms of the complex network. This paper supplied molecular genetic regulation network of plant flowering time under stresses, attempting to provide basement for researchers to study the relationship between environment and plant flowering time. |
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| ISSN: | 1008-9209 2097-5155 |