Epigenetics, a mode for plants to respond to abiotic stresses

Abstract

Epigenetics has been becoming a hot topic in recent years. It can be mechanisms that regulate gene expression without changing DNA base sequence. In plants epigenetic regulation has been implicated to be a very important phenomenon and mechanism for the regulation of responses to environmental stresses. Environmental signals induce various epigenetic modifications in the genome, and these epigenetic modifications might likely be inherited to the next generation that behaves with enhanced ability to tolerate stresses. This review highlights recent advances in the study of epigenetics in plant stress responses.

Keywords

Epigenetics / chromatin / genome / environmental stress / histone modification

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant no. 2009CB941500), by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 30770207), and partially by the State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Shandong Agricultrual University (No. 2010KF01).

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