Author(s)/Creator(s)

Febri Adi SusantoFollow

Document Type

Poster

Language

English

Date

Summer 8-2019

Keywords

Fulbright, plant memory, epigenetic regulation, lamarck theory

Description/Abstract

Plants are sessile organisms; they cannot move like animals when the environment is not favorable. Therefore, plants need a mechanism to cope with environmental changes. For example, when a plant experiences stress, like water deficit, it will employ a certain mechanism that allows the plant to survive the next exposure (see Fig. 1), often referred to as “Epigenetic” regulation. By application, epigenetics deals with the changes of the level of the gene expression without change in the DNA sequence, by DNA methylation, histone modifications, and or small RNA regulation. Plant epigenetic regulation is related to the Lamarckian theory of evolution. Lamarck’s (1744 – 1829) discredited theory of how transgenerational memory could be passed down through generations became one possible explanation for how plants become more resistant to future stress through acquisition of memory (see Fig. 2). Basically, an unnecessary gene (stress gene) is turned off. However, during stress, plant cells need to reactivate the genes by removing silencing marks, but the longer it is activated, the more prone the plant is to stress. The learning process can be induced and referred as priming. In the basic mechanism of priming, the histone demethylase enzyme unwinds the specific DNA regions that contain stress genes and remove the silent marks; thus it can be expressed more rapidly to tackle unfavorable condition compare to unprimed plants (consult the Figure 3). Remarkably, this working model of epigenetic transgenerational memory has also been applied for generating resistant plants with the same epigenetic mark by tissue culture propagation technique, which had been impossible to achieve previously (see Figure 4).

Disciplines

Education | Higher Education

Funder(s)

Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the U.S. Department of State

Funding ID

S-ECAGD-19-CA-0045

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge fulbright U.S Student Program, IIE (The Power of International Education), Syracuse University English Language Institute, AMINEF (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Additional Information

This work has been created with support from the Institute of International Education (IIE)/Fulbright - English for Graduate Students Program.

Accessibility Notice

For an accessible version of this document, email request containing a link to this page to lib-accessibility@syr.edu.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.