Jakarta –
Just like humans, plants also have memories and memories. Interestingly, in a different way of working, plant memories can be passed on genetically. How to?
It should be noted, the memories and memories possessed by plants differ in how they work with humans. In plants, memories and memories are unique features in the heritable DNA code.
An example of memory is when many plants feel and remember prolonged cold weather during winter to ensure that plants flower in spring. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
This is known as “epigenetic memory,” which occurs by modifying special proteins called histones, which are important for packaging and indexing DNA in cells.
How Plants Remember at Flowering
One such histone modification is H3K27me3, which tends to flag genes that are turned off. In the case of flowering plants, cold conditions cause H3K27me3 to accumulate in the genes that control flowering.
Previous research in the laboratory has shown how H3K27me3 is consistently transmitted from cell to cell so that in spring, plants remember that cold weather and winter are over, allowing them to flower at the right time.
But unfortunately, after flowering and seeding, the seeds have to forget the ‘memory’ of this cold weather so they don’t flower too soon when winter comes again. This is because H3K27me3 is copied faithfully from cell to cell.
How Can Plants Forget Memories?
Jörg Becker, principal investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal is involved in an international team led by researcher Frédéric Berger, of the Gregor Mendel Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
That study explains how researchers began to analyze histones in pollen, and hypothesized that forgetting in plants would most likely occur in embedded sperm.
“This research led us to identify a phenomenon, called epigenetic resetting, similar to deleting and reformatting data on a hard drive,” said Jörg Becker. EurekAlert!.
Interestingly, the researchers were surprised to find that H3K27me3 was missing in the sperm. Instead, they found that sperm collects a special histone that is unable to carry H3K27me3.
This ensures that these modifications (proteins) are deleted from hundreds of genes, not only genes that prevent flowering but also genes that control a large number of important functions in the seed, which is produced after the sperm is carried by the pollen to fuse with the plant egg.
“This actually makes a lot of sense from an ecological point of view” says Dr. Borg, first author of the paper.
“Because pollen can be spread over long distances, for example by wind or bees, and most of the ‘memory’ carried by H3K27me3 is related to environmental adaptation, it makes sense that fry should “forget” their father’s environment and remember their mother’s environment instead.” because they are most likely to spread and grow next to the mother,” he explained further.
According to Dr. Berger, just like plants, animals also erase this epigenetic memory in sperm, but they do it by replacing histones with completely different proteins.
“This is one of the first examples of how variant-specific histones can help reprogram and reset a single epigenetic mark while leaving the other untouched,” he explained.
The researchers hope that aspects of this rearrangement mechanism they discovered will also be found in other organisms in a developmental context.
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2023-09-05 00:00:45
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