This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When they start to get too warm but before they're dangerously hot, most plants employ a similar playbook. They change their shape, a host of adaptations that includes growing longer stems and stalks to promote air circulation.
The protective reactions to stressful but nonlethal heat, called thermomorphogenesis, help plants endure challenging conditions, but the downside for crops is lower yields. Though it's a delicate balance, adjusting when a plant's cooling strategies kick in would be useful for developing crops that are resilient to warmer weather with minimal production loss. "We want plants to be able to respond to the warmth, but in a way that's not so responsive that they become frail," said Hongqing "Michelle" Guo, an assistant professor of genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State University.
New research led by Guo could help plant scientists find a sweet spot that preserves both resilience and yield. The recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified a molecular mechanism for triggering the moderate-heat response, a crucial step toward fine-tuning how plants prioritize production and protection. The new study builds on decades of research into phytochrome B (phyB), a plant protein that acts as a combination thermometer, light sensor and biological switch.
When it is activated by absorbing sufficient light in favorable growing temperatures, phyB prevents plants from elongating. When an environment is too warm or dark for too long, phyB fades into a deactivated form and thermomorphogenesis begins. Guo's lab focuses largely on another long-studied plant protein called Feronia, a workhorse receptor that spans cell membranes.
Positioned both inside and outside of cells, Feronia acts as a command center for how a plant responds to its environment, detecting and decoding signals that drive a wide range of processes related to plant health and growth. Working with Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering plant often used in genetic research, Guo noticed specimens mutated to lack Feronia didn't react as intensely in settings warm enough to spur thermomorphogenesis. That implied a possible link to phyB, she said.
Looking for signs of a connection, researchers used a set of advanced whole-system analytical methods to compare natural and Feronia-free Arabidopsis. One of those methods was a phosphoproteomic analysis, which catalogs all the sites throughout a sample where adding a phosphate group could change a protein's function—a process called phosphorylation that toggles biological actions on and off. The comparison flagged two phyB amino acids as possible control switches for Feronia, Guo said.
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