Thermomorphogenesis: opportunities and challenges in post-transcriptional regulation

Abstract

Plants exposed to mildly elevated temperatures display morphological and developmental changes collectively termed thermomorphogenesis. This adaptative process has several undesirable consequences for food production, including yield reduction and increased vulnerability to pathogens. Understanding thermomorphogenesis is, thus, critical for understanding how plants will respond to conditions of increasingly warmer temperature, such as those caused by climate change. Recently, major advances in that direction have been made, and it has become apparent that plants resort to a broad range of molecules and molecular mechanisms to perceive and respond to increases in environmental temperature. However, most effort has been focused on regulation of transcription and protein abundance and activity, with an important gap encompassing nearly all processes involving RNA (i.e. post-transcriptional regulation). Here, current knowledge of thermomorphogenesis involving transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational regulation is summarized, focusing on opportunities and challenges in understanding post-transcriptional regulation-a fertile field for exciting new discoveries.

Keywords: Gene regulation; RNA decay; post-transcription; response to temperature; thermomorphogenesis; translation.