So what's new in the field of plant cold acclimation? Lots!

Due to its intrinsically interesting nature and importance to agriculture, considerable effort has been directed at understanding the phenomenon of “cold acclimation,” the process whereby certain plants increase in freezing tolerance upon exposure to low temperature. By 1980, thousands of research articles had been published on the topic and significant insights had been gained, including the following: Freezing tolerance is a multigenic trait, freezing injury in most plants and tissues results largely from the severe cellular dehydration that occurs upon ice formation, and the cellular membrane systems are a primary site of freeze-induced injury. What was lacking, however, was a consensus regarding the mechanistic basis of freezing tolerance. Moreover, specific genes with functional roles in freezing tolerance had not been identified and their modes of action had not been determined, critical deficiencies in regard to both a basic understanding of cold acclimation and practical efforts to improve the stress tolerance of agronomic plants. Now, 20 years later, the cold acclimation research landscape has dramatically changed. Largely through bringing molecular genetic and mutational approaches to bear on the topic, along with the development of Arabidopsis as a model to study the phenomenon, genes with roles in cold acclimation have begun to be identified and their modes of action determined. In addition, low-temperature signaling and regulatory pathways involved in activating the cold acclimation response have begun to be described and the insights gained are beginning to suggest novel approaches to improve the environmental stress tolerance of plants. My objective here is to highlight some of these exciting advances.