Plant stress memory gets unpredictable as climate conditions shift
Sanchez-Lucas R
Climate Adaptation
The tomato plant that fought off aphids last summer may respond faster to pests this year, but a heat wave or drought could just as easily erase that learned defense before it's needed.
Plants have a kind of memory: after facing a stress like disease or drought once, they can respond faster and stronger the next time it happens. Scientists call this priming, and it works through chemical signals and changes in how genes get switched on, sometimes even passing to the plant's offspring. The catch is that heat, drought, and rising CO2 levels can either sharpen this memory or wipe it out entirely, depending on timing and how stresses stack up, which makes it tricky to rely on for protecting crops as the climate keeps changing.
Key Findings
Defence priming involves signalling networks, epigenetic changes, and transcriptional mechanisms that create both short-term (somatic) and transgenerational plant memory.
Climate factors like elevated temperature, drought, and increased CO2 can either enhance or suppress priming effectiveness depending on stress combination, timing, and intensity.
Primed defensive states carry physiological and fitness trade-offs, meaning better disease resistance can come at a cost to plant growth or reproduction.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Plants can 'remember' past stress and respond faster to future threats, a phenomenon called priming, but climate change is scrambling how well this memory works, sometimes boosting plant defenses and sometimes breaking them down.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Plant defence priming and memory mechanisms under climate change.
Climate change exposes plants to increasingly variable and overlapping abiotic and biotic stresses, challenging ecosystem stability as well as the survival and productivity of crops beyond the limi...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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