Regulation of Alternative Splicing in Plant Stress Responses

Plants are sessile organisms capable of adaptation to various environmental constraints, such as temperature stress, drought, salinity, or pathogen attack. To survive unfavorable conditions, plants actively regulate expression and/or alternative splicing of stress-responsive genes to expand genome capacity. Alternative splicing is a regulatory process where pre-mRNA are variably spliced by the spliceosomes generating several transcripts from one pre-mRNA molecule. Different mRNA transcripts govern synthesis of several structurally and functionally distinct protein isoforms or products, thereby amplifying the diversity of a plant proteome and reprogram intracellular regulatory networks using a limited number of genes. Recent genome-wide studies revealed that alternative splicing is highly pervasive in plants, with at least 40-60% of intron-containing genes producing different isoforms. This highlights the importance of alternative splicing in plant performance, adaptation, and survival. Deep sequencing of plant transcriptomes provided evidence that various stresses strongly affect the frequency and diversity of alternative splicing events in a vast number of stress-responsive genes, which in turn could have an impact on plant stress response and adaptation.

Despite massive RNA-seq and other modern approaches allowing considerable progress in our understanding of alternative splicing, the biological functions and incidence of specific alternative splicing events remain largely unknown. Further active studies are needed to analyze alternative splicing and shed light on its contribution to plant environmental stress tolerance.

This Research Topic aims to report the most recent advances on stress-related alternative splicing, from event identification to specific function investigation. We aim to unravel the linkage between alternative splicing incidence and environmental stress adaptation in plants. Importantly, this Research Topic also welcomes papers focused on alternative splicing applications in plant biotechnology and crop improvement.

This Research Topic will include Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, or Methods articles related but not limited to the following specific themes:

- Specific alternative splicing events in response to abiotic and biotic stresses.
- Regulatory roles and functional significance of splice isoforms in plant stress tolerance.
- Genome-wide analysis of stress-related alternative splicing by RNA-seq.
- Alternative splicing applications in plant biotechnology and crop improvement.
- Mechanisms of alternative splicing regulation in response to stress.
- New methods (or method modifications) for analysis of alternative splicing events in response to environmental or biotic cues.
- Stress-related production of non-functional isoforms (transcripts with intron retention and premature termination codons).
- Engineering alternative splicing in plants.

Please note: Descriptive studies that report changes in splicing patterns in response to a particular stress will not be considered for review unless they are expanded and provide insight into the biological system or process being studied.