In a recent study published in Cell Reports, YU Hasi and his colleagues from the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the ribosomal biogenesis factor STCH4 confers cold stress tolerance by maintaining rRNA processing and promoting CBFs protein translation under low temperatures.
The researchers screened an Arabidopsis transfer DNA (T-DNA) insertion library and identified a cold-hypersensitive mutant, which they named sensitive to chilling 4 (stch4). The stch4 mutant plants exhibited more retarded growth in shoots and roots than the wild type when exposed to low temperature.
Further study showed that the stch4 mutation resulted in reduced production of the CBFs proteins and thus diminished induction of the CBF regulon genes, which might be attributed to the abnormality of ribosomal RNA processing in the stch4 mutants under cold stress.
Collectively, these results indicated that ribosome is likely a site for cold stress response.
This study reveals a novel molecular mechanism of cold stress response and tolerance in plants, which could help engineering cold tolerant crops through genetic manipulations.
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