Psychrotrophic bacteria are capable of developing over a wide temperature range and they can grow at temperatures close to or below freezing. This ability requires specific adaptative strategies in order to maintain membrane fluidity, the continuance of their metabolic activities, and protein synthesis at low temperature. A cold-shock response has been described in several psychrotrophic bacter...

In this short review, I will first summarize criteria by which environments can be considered "cold", with plant stature (size, height above ground) playing a central role for the climate actually experienced. Plants adapted to such environments have to cope with both extremes and with gradual influences of low temperature. The first requires freezing resistance, which is tightly coupled to dev...

Temperate plants develop a greater ability to withstand freezing in response to a period of low but nonfreezing temperatures through a complex, adaptive process of cold acclimation. Very little is known about the signaling processes by which plants perceive the low temperature stimulus and transduce it into the nucleus to activate genes needed for increased freezing tolerance. To help understan...

Migrants of the eastern North American population of the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, are often subjected to subzero temperatures, heavy dews and frost in late September and October during the autumn migration to overwintering sites in Mexico. Adults of this generation had the capacity to rapidly increase their cold-hardiness. A chilling period of 1 h at +4OC before exposure to -4OC for...

Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of low temperatures on anthocyanin accumulation in apple and peach shoots. The anthocyanin concentration in both the apple and peach shoots increased rapidly during cold acclimation reaching the peak value in early December. The anthocyanin might be accumulated in shoots as a result of leucoanthocyanidin conversion. When apple and peach shoo...

In contrast to previous studies of rapid cold-hardening (RCH), which have investigated the responses of insects maintained under 'summer conditions' (20 degrees to 25 degrees C), this study focuses on the ability of low-temperature acclimated insects to undergo RCH. When the grain aphid Sitobion avenae Fabricus was low-temperature acclimated by rearing for three generations at 10 degrees C, the...

The food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes can grow in a wide range of temperatures, and several key virulence determinants of the organism are expressed at 37 degrees C but are strongly repressed below 30 degrees C. However, the impact of growth temperature on the ability of the bacteria to tolerate environmental stresses remains poorly understood. In other microorganisms, cold acclimation...

Despite the fact that cold shock domain proteins (CSDPs) and glycine-rich RNA-binding proteins (GRPs) have been implicated to play a role during the cold adaptation process, their importance and function in eukaryotes, including plants, are largely unknown. To understand the functional role of plant CSDPs and GRPs in the cold response, two CSDPs (CSDP1 and CSDP2) and three GRPs (GRP2, GRP4 and ...

plant tissue culture refers to growing and multiplication of cells, tissues and organs of plants on defined solid or liquid media under aseptic and controlled environment. micropropagation allows rapid production of high quality, disease-free and uniform planting material. the micropropagation of high quality planting materials of ornamentals, and forest and fruit trees has created new opportun...

In plants, low temperature causes massive transcriptional changes, many of which are presumed to be involved in the process of cold acclimation. Given the diversity of developmental and environmental factors between experiments, it is surprising that their influence on the identification of cold-responsive genes is largely unknown. A systematic investigation of genes responding to 1 d of cold t...