Title: How do plants remember a stressful day? – Interplay of transcription factors and chromatin to regulate heat stress memory

Speaker: Prof. Isabel Bäurle, Institute for Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Germany

Abstract:

In nature, plants often encounter chronic or recurring stressful conditions. Plants can be primed by exposure to stress, thereby activating a stress memory that enables a more efficient response upon a recurring stress incident. My lab studies heat stress memory in plants as a model case for environmental stress memory. Heat stress induces sustained histone methylation at a subset of heat-inducible loci (memory genes), marking them as recently transcriptionally active and priming them for enhanced re-induction. This methylation requires the activity of specific heat-shock transcription factors. In addition, it requires the kinase module of the Mediator co-activator complex to mediate enhanced transcriptional activity after reinduction. I will present our latest findings of how complex interactions between different levels of transcriptional and epigenetic regulation sustain this transcriptional memory.