ReviewRetrospective and perspective of plant epigenetics in China
Section snippets
General overview of plant epigenetic research in China
With the continuous improvements of sequencing technology and the accomplishment of the annotation of Arabidopsis genome, epigenetic studies have experienced explosive growth over the past several decades. Similar situation also occurs in China, one of the major agricultural countries in the world, especially in the field of plant genetics benefiting from the growing research funding and the rich plant resources. Based on the public database from “Web of Science”, we analyzed the publications
Dynamic regulation of DNA methylation pattern in plants
DNA 5-methylcytosine (5mC) modification is a hallmark of epigenetic gene silencing and heterochromatin in both plants and mammals. DNA methylation is involved in multiple cellular and biological processes. High level of DNA methylation is required for the silencing of transposable elements (TEs) which is important for genome stability (Slotkin and Martienssen, 2007). Proper patterns of DNA methylation are crucial for the precise regulation of growth and development (Zilberman et al., 2007). In
N6-adenosine methylation
In addition to the most extensively studied DNA cytosine methylation, N6-adenosine methylation (6mA), which can occur in RNA and DNA strands, is gaining more and more attentions recently. The importance of RNA methylation at N6-adenosine is constantly being clarified and Chinese researchers have achieved great achievements in this field. 6mA plays crucial roles in multiple biological processes. Pattern and function of 6mA methylation are determined by RNA methyltransferase, 6mA-binding protein
Histone modifications
Histone modifications refer to the posttranslational covalent modifications on the amino-terminal tails of the core histones. Histone posttranslational modifications (PTMs) serve as histone code to constitute the other layer of epigenetic mechanism. These PTMs include acetylation, methylation, ubiquitination, sumoylation, and phosphorylation. Regulation of histone modifications has been extensively investigated. Among different histone modifications, histone methylation, which not only occurs
Epigenetic mechanisms in flowering time regulation
The floral transition is a major developmental switch in angiosperms. This biological process is tightly controlled by multiple mechanisms, including environmental (temperature, photoperiod and vernalization) and genetic (autonomous pathway, gibberellin (GA) pathway and FRIGIDA (FRI) pathway) factors. In Arabidopsis, the flowering repressor FLC is a convergent point of several flowering pathways. The expression of FLC is promoted by FRI and repressed by autonomous pathway and vernalization (He,
DNA methylation and plant development
Although there is no clear evidence of resetting of DNA methylation during plant development, recent studies revealed a tight control of DNA methylation levels in different tissues and cell types during plant development. Gene imprinting, a mechanism of parental allele-specific expression which plays key roles in seed development, is closely associated with DME-dependent DNA demethylation and siRNA-dependent RdDM pathway (Gehring et al., 2004, 2006; Kinoshita et al., 2004). Dr. Jinsheng Lai's
Epigenetic regulation in abiotic stress responses
Epigenetic regulation of plant responses to environmental stresses has been a fascinated research partially due to the concept of stress memory. In some cases, the transcriptional regulation of stress response genes is associated with DNA methylation with general or locus-specific manner. Recent studies revealed important involvements of DNA methylation in high temperature (HT) stress in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) and Brassica plants (Li et al., 2016a; Liu et al., 2017c; Ma et al., 2018). Ma
Perspective
In this review, we summarize the advances in the field of plant epigenetics in China over the past several decades. We focus our review on the publications contributed by Chinese researchers and groups. Epigenetics, as the hotspot in the field of transcriptional regulation, has been developing rapidly over the past few decades. Benefiting from the growing funding and the importance of agricultural sciences, great achievements have been made in the field of plant epigenetics in China and some
Acknowledgments
The authors apologize to our colleagues whose work is not cited due to the space constraints. Work in Cheng-Guo Duan's laboratory is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB27040203) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31770155).
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2022, International Journal of Biological MacromoleculesCitation Excerpt :Various mechanisms inside the plants sensing the environment and enormous changes occur in gene regulation and expression to withstand the multiple stress conditions [3–5]. These epigenetic modifications directly affect plants throughout their lifespan and are inherited in subsequent generations [6,7]. Epigenetic changes cause DNA modifications or structural changes in chromatin rather than DNA sequence changes [6,7].