One ancient gene family gives plants their stress-response toolkit
Dong G, Lei J, Gao X, Jiang Y, Deng J
Crop Improvement
The tomato plant that bounces back after a cold snap or the drought-tolerant variety at your garden center likely owes that resilience to this same family of genetic switches working behind the scenes.
Plants have a big set of built-in genetic switches, called AP2/ERF proteins, that turn on the right responses when things get tough: drought, cold, flooding, or disease. Over millions of years, plants copied and tweaked these switches so that closely related versions can end up doing very different jobs, sometimes even opposite ones, depending on the plant and the stress. This review pulls together recent research on how that happened and suggests where scientists should look next if they want to engineer crops that handle climate stress better.
Key Findings
AP2/ERF transcription factors expanded through gene duplication events, with post-duplication divergence driving functional diversification across plant lineages
Closely related AP2/ERF genes can produce contrasting physiological outcomes depending on biological context, complicating simple structure-function predictions
The review identifies priority research gaps: validation in non-model species, multi-stress experiments, multi-omics integration, field phenotyping, and gene-editing-based breeding applications
chevron_right Technical Summary
Plants carry a huge family of genetic switches called AP2/ERF that help them sense stress like drought, cold, and disease, then coordinate their hormones to respond. This review maps how that family grew and diversified over evolutionary time, and points to ways scientists could edit these switches to breed tougher crops.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
AP2/ERF transcription factors in plant stress adaptation: evolutionary expansion, functional diversification and hormone crosstalk.
APETALA2/ethylene response factor (AP2/ERF) transcription factors constitute a plant-specific regulatory family that coordinates plant development, environmental stress responses, and hormone signa...
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Climate adaptation in plants refers to the physiological and evolutionary mechanisms through which plants adjust to changing environmental conditions, including temperature shifts, altered precipitation patterns, and seasonal variations. Understanding these processes is essential for plant science
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