Environmental Stress Memory in Plants

As sessile organisms, plants have to adapt to various environmental stresses, such as heat, drought, salinity, cold, pathogen infection and herbivore attack. To cope with these environmental stresses, plants have evolved sophisticated mechanisms and strategies, involving stress perception, signal transduction, (post-) transcription regulation, and (post-) translation regulation etc. Stress priming can acclimatize plants to the same or different stresses in the future. In order to adapt to recurring stresses, plants have developed the capacity for stress memory, which is distinguished as somatic stress memory, intergenerational memory ,and transgenerational memory. Meanwhile, stress memory also can be established on a spatial scale by employing systemic signaling pathways. The systemic signaling pathways deliver stress signals from a stressed part of the plant (named as local tissue), to the unstressed part of the plant or the entire plant (named as systemic tissue). Once these systemic signals are perceived in the systemic tissues of plants, they induce systemic acquired resistance (SAR), which enables systemic tissues to withstand the stress even if they have not yet sensed or experienced it yet. With the increasing world population, it is important to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of plant stress response and memory with the aim of improving plant stress resistance and crop yield and quality.

In recent years, there are increasing reports of plant adaptations to changing environmental conditions. A series of studies have revealed that epigenetic regulation, including DNA methylation, histone modification, chromatin remodeling, nucleosome positioning, and non-coding RNA-mediated regulation, plays a crucial part in plant stress response and memory. With the development of high-throughput technologies (e.g., transcriptomics, epigenomics and proteomics), vast amounts of large-scale data have provided a comprehensive and in-depth perspective on the mechanistic basis of plant acclimation to environmental stresses. This Research Topic will focus on exciting advances in this field of stress memory and systemic signaling to biotic or abiotic stress in plants.

We welcome submissions of all article types published by Frontiers in Plant Science that focus on the following topics, including but not limited to:

• Sensing and signal transduction of biotic or abiotic stress.
• The systemic signaling in biotic or abiotic stress.
• The interaction effect of multiple stresses on plant stress memory.
• Effects of stress intensity and duration on plant stress memory.
• Genetic and epigenetic regulation of plant stress response and memory.