Data mining approaches highlighted transcription factors that play role in thermo-priming

Abiotic stresses including heat are major threats to crop plants especially considering the global warming facts. A pre-exposure to heat stress can prime plants and enable them to encounter a severe dose of stress which is lethal to unprimed plants. In this study, in order to identifying potential key elements involved in priming responses to heat stress we analyzed a microarray series in Arabidopsis thaliana. To this end we conducted differential expression analysis, clustering, annotation and network construction by using the publicly available tools. In agreement with experimentally validated results we noticed that different genes were differentially expressed between primed and unprimed plants from which genes encoding retro-elements and proteins involved in chromatin remodeling were noteworthy. The topology analysis of constructed network highlighted the role of TFs including zinc finger and DREB in heat acclimation after priming phase. A total of 33 transcription factors were differentially expressed in primed versus unprimed plants five of which were detected to be hub and bottleneck nodes in genes network that may play a role in heat stress priming and memory additionally as potential targets to discover new insights to improve stress resistance in crop plants.