Plants pass on memories of cold winters to descendants

Plants pass on memories of cold winters to descendants
Plants pass on memories of cold winters to descendants
Anonim

Attention, the question is - can we trust the media reports that plants actually have a memory? Agree, reading this one involuntarily recalls such masterpieces of journalism as “trees eat people in the Rostov region” or “plants are already reading your thoughts” or plants kill people / zombies / cows … further down the list. In fact, scientists really believe that plants have a memory that is certainly different from ours. As the authors of the new study write, the phenomenon of epigenetic memory in plants means that children inherit memory from their parents along with stem cell DNA. In very simple terms, this is an inherited memory that helps plants remember the winter cold and bloom in the spring and not at other times of the year. Moreover, when plants give seeds, they "erase" this information from epigenetic memory so as not to bloom ahead of time.

It may seem a little strange, but plant epigenetic memory has exactly the same purpose as human memory - to enable the body to adapt to change. The environment is one of the main engines of evolution. Two years ago, researchers from Birmingham and Nottingham deciphered the mechanism by which plants "forget" and "remember" changes in the environment.

In a paper published in the Journal Nature Communications, the researchers write that the memory function of plants allows them to precisely coordinate their development in response to stress or the changing seasons. Plants are assisted in this by a group of proteins called PRC2. In the cold, these proteins combine into a single protein complex and transfer the plant to flowering mode.

Proteins PRC2 belong to a group of proteins that can control the movement of parts of chromosomes along DNA. That is why they are all located at the right distance from each other.

Later, another study, carried out in collaboration with scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Utrecht, revealed a new understanding of the function of PRC2 - "sensing the environment." This became possible after the discovery of another protein - VRN2. As it turned out, under favorable conditions (a lot of sun, oxygen, etc.) VRN2 is unstable and decays quickly. But when it snows or the plant is flooded, VRN2 builds up in the body and prevents flowering. This is a kind of "switch" for the PRC2. The authors of the work note that similar proteins are present in animals.

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Plants, like other living things on Earth, have memory.

Now an international team of specialists has confirmed the presence of epigenetic memory in plants. As it turns out, plant memories are produced by modifying specialized proteins called histones. Histones are, among other things, responsible for the "packaging" of DNA in the cell. One of these histone modifications is called H3K27me3: if it's too cold outside, then H3K27me3 accumulates in genes that control flowering. Previous work has shown exactly how H3K27me3 is transferred from cell to cell, which helps plants remember the cold season and bloom when it gets warm.

According to Muy Interesante, in the course of the work, the researchers discovered the so-called "epigenetic reset", which is reminiscent of erasing and reformatting data on a hard drive. Another interesting discovery was the fact that a special histone accumulates in the seeds, which H3K27me3 cannot tolerate. “It makes a lot of sense from an environmental point of view,” said Dr. Borg, the first author of a paper that compiled studies and results that were recently published in Nature Cell Biology.

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Plants pass on the memory of cold winters to their children

Since pollen can travel long distances, for example by wind or bees, and most of the "memory" carried by H3K27me3 is associated with adaptation to the environment, it is logical that the seeds "forget" the environmental conditions of their father and instead remember the environment. their mother's environment as they are more likely to reproduce and grow alongside their mother.

Joerg Becker, scientist at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science

The authors of the work note that, like plants, animals "erase" epigenetic memory in sperm, but they do this by replacing histones with a completely different protein. In fact, this is one of the first examples of how a specialized variant of histones can help reprogram and realign one epigenetic label while leaving others intact. The researchers hope that aspects of this rearrangement mechanism will be found in other organisms in the future.

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