Frost-fighter, SVALKA-PRC2: Winter, bring it on!

Abstract

How does the plant survive in nature’s extremes? Plants possess different adaptive mechanisms, such as developing tolerance to low temperatures to thrive in harsh freezing conditions, a process known as cold acclimation. One of the major players in cold acclimation is C-REPEAT BINDING FACTORS (CBFs), a family of three tandemly duplicated CBF paralogs that activate cold-inducible genes (Novillo et al., 2007). The CBF family is induced during low temperatures, and its expression reaches the maximum in the initial phase of low temperatures, further decreasing in the later stages of low temperatures (Medina et al., 1999). While the role of CBF in cold induction has been extensively investigated, the underlying mechanisms of decline in CBF expression in later stages of low-temperature conditions remain elusive.