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Korean Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (생화학분자생물학회)
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Negative evidence on the transgenerational inheritance of defense priming in Arabidopsis thaliana

  • Yun, Se-Hun (School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University) ;
  • Noh, Bosl (Research Institute of Basic Sciences, Seoul National University) ;
  • Noh, Yoo-Sun (School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University)
  • Received : 2022.01.12
  • Accepted : 2022.03.15
  • Published : 2022.07.31
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Abstract

Defense priming allows plants to enhance their immune responses to subsequent pathogen challenges. Recent reports suggested that acquired resistances in parental generation can be inherited into descendants. Although epigenetic mechanisms are plausible tools enabling the transmission of information or phenotypic traits induced by environmental cues across generations, the mechanism for the transgenerational inheritance of defense priming in plants has yet to be elucidated. With the initial aim to elucidate an epigenetic mechanism for the defense priming in plants, we reassessed the transgenerational inheritance of plant defense, however, could not observe any evidence supporting it. By using the same dipping method with previous reports, Arabidopsis was exposed repeatedly to Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000 (Pst DC3000) during vegetative or reproductive stages. Irrespective of the developmental stages of parental plants that received pathogen infection, the descendants did not exhibit primed resistance phenotypes, defense marker gene (PR1) expression, or elevated histone acetylation within PR1 chromatin. In assays using the pressure-infiltration method for infection, we obtained the same results as above. Thus, our results suggest that the previous observations on the transgenerational inheritance of defense priming in plants should be more extensively and carefully reassessed.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF- 2021R1A2C1012064 and NRF-2021R1A5A1032428 to Y.-S.N. and NRF-2020R1A2C2008109 to B.N.]. S.-H.Y. was partially supported by the Stadelmann-Lee Scholarship Fund of Seoul National University.

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