Advances in plant sensitivity to low temperature stress

Temperature stress is one of the important environmental factors that affect crop yield and geographical distribution High temperature and low temperature damage affect every stage of plant growth and development Because the main food of human beings is produced by flowering plants through sexual reproduction, it is very important to understand the mechanism of how plants adapt to temperature stress in the stage of sexual reproduction and development to cope with the impact of environmental change on agricultural production At present, many research results have elaborated the influence of temperature stress on plant growth and development in detail, but the research mainly focuses on plant root, stem, leaf and other tissues, and the research on plant reproductive organs with short and very complex development stage is very rare However, scientists have long noticed that plant sexual reproduction is highly sensitive to low temperature and cold stress, resulting in a significant reduction in crop yield In the stage of plant sexual reproduction, temperature stress can lead to the abnormal structure and function of reproductive organs, as well as fertilization failure and other serious consequences It is believed that the development of male reproductive organs is most sensitive to cold stress in the whole life cycle of plants Recently, Zou Changshong, a doctoral student under the guidance of Yu DiQiu, a researcher in the molecular biology research group of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, used Arabidopsis pollen as the research material Through gene function analysis, he confirmed that the mature pollen grains of plants are sensitive to cold stress, because wrky34, a transcription regulator specifically expressed by pollen grains, inhibits CBF1 and CBF2 induced by low temperature And CBF3 The results were published in the International Journal of experimental botany WRKY gene family is a unique transcription regulator superfamily in plants, which plays an important role in the regulation of plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress and its signal transduction pathway Zou Changsong et al Found that the transcription regulator wrky34 gene of Arabidopsis was specifically expressed in mature pollen cells, and was strongly induced by low temperature and cold stress Genetic analysis showed that the sensitivity of mature pollen grains of wrky34 gene T-DNA insertion mutants (wrky34-1 and wrky34-1) to cold stress was significantly lower than that of wild type, and its pollen viability was significantly higher than that of wild type after cold stress By comparing and analyzing the effects of low temperature and cold stress on the viability of mature pollen grains, pollen germination, pollen tube elongation and seed yield of plants, it was further confirmed that the pollen viability of wrky34 mature pollen was significantly higher than that of wild type, and that the mature pollen grains of wrky34 transgenic plants with high expression showed sterility even without cold treatment This indicated that wrky34, as a negative transcription regulator, was involved in the response of mature pollen grains to cold stress In the mature pollen grains of wild-type plants, CBF1, CBF2 and CBF3 genes strongly induced by low temperature can not be induced by cold, while in wrky34, CBF series genes and their downstream target genes can be strongly induced, which indicates that wrky34 may negatively regulate the expression of CBF series genes in mature pollen grains, so as to participate in the response of mature pollen grains to cold stress.