Research Projects

High temperatures pose a significant threat to global food security, necessitating the development of novel crop varieties with improved heat tolerance for enhanced productivity. Plants have a multifaceted response to environmental challenges, known as basal tolerance, which may not be sufficient to cope with stress. However, plants exhibit the ability to retain the memory of previous stress exposure, which aids in mounting an efficient response to subsequent stresses, known as acquired tolerance. Exposure to non-lethal stress acts as a cue that "primes" plants to efficiently combat future lethal stress. Priming-induced stress memory allows plants to mount a robust, efficient response through gene expression changes, but requires resetting the memory over time. Chromatin remodelling facilitates dynamic changes in gene expression and acts as an interface between environment and genome. Understanding how priming-induced chromatin regulatory mechanisms enable plants to mount an efficient stress response is crucial for breeding or engineering stress-resilient crops. Histone modifiers, such as histone-acetyltransferases (HATs) and de-acetylases (HDACs), play a crucial role in chromatin structure, influencing DNA accessibility for transcription factor binding. The proposed research aims to elucidate the role of class I HDACs in regulating thermopriming-mediated AT, identify global and loci-specific histone acetylation associated with HDAC-specific AT, and identify HDAC-driven transcriptional reprogramming that mediates AT. The research aims to modify target loci for acetylation marks and assess the magnitude/duration of heat stress response in transgenic plants.