Chilling and freezing temperatures adversely affect the productivity and quality of crops. Hence improving the cold hardiness of crop plants is an important goal in agriculture, which demands a clear understanding of cold stress signal perception and transduction. Pharmacological and biochemical evidence shows that membrane rigidification followed by cytoskeleton rearrangement, Ca(2+) influx an...

When exposed to stress conditions, all cells induce mechanisms resulting in an attempt to adapt to stress that involve proteins which, once activated, trigger cell responses by modulating specific signaling pathways. In this work, using a combination of pulldown assays and mass spectrometry analyses, we identified the Neurospora crassa SEB-1 transcription factor that binds to the Stress Respons...

All plants sense and adapt to adverse environmental conditions, however, crop plants exhibit less genetic diversity for abiotic stress tolerance than do wild relatives indicating that a genetic basis exists for stress adaptability. Model plant genetic systems and the plethora of molecular genetic resources that are currently available are greatly enhancing our ability to identify abiotic stress...

Plastid-derived signals are known to coordinate expression of nuclear genes encoding plastid-localized proteins in a process termed retrograde signaling. To date, the identity of retrograde-signaling molecules has remained elusive. Here, we show that methylerythritol cyclodiphosphate (MEcPP), a precursor of isoprenoids produced by the plastidial methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway, elicits...

The genome-wide role of heterotrimeric G-proteins in abiotic stress response in rice has not been examined from a functional genomics perspective, despite the availability of mutants and evidences involving individual genes/processes/stresses. Our rice whole transcriptome microarray analysis (GSE 20925 at NCBI GEO) using the G-alpha subunit (RGA1) null mutant (Daikoku 1 or d1) and its correspon...

Profound understanding of the mechanisms foodborne pathogenic bacteria utilize in adaptation to the environmental stress they encounter during food processing and storage is of paramount importance in design of control measures. Chill temperature is a central control measure applied in minimally processed foods; however, data on the mechanisms the foodborne pathogen Clostridium botulinum activa...

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) plays an essential role in adaptive stress responses. The hormone regulates, among others, the expression of numerous stress-responsive genes. From various promoter analyses, ABA-responsive elements (ABREs) have been determined and a number of ABRE binding factors have been isolated, although their in vivo roles are not known. Here we report that the ABRE bi...

Accumulation of unfolded or misfolded proteins causes endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, which activates a set of ER membrane-associated transcription factors for protein homeostasis regulation. Previous genome-wide chromatin immunoprecipitation analysis shows a strong correlation between histone H3K4 trimethylation (H3K4me3) and active gene expression. However, how the histone modification com...