botanyone
Brachypodium distachyon is considered a powerful model system to study the response of temperate cereals to adverse environmental conditions. Colton-Gagnon et al. examine cold acclimation and freezing tolerance in seven diploid accessions, and find that cold treatment accelerates the transition from the vegetative to the reproductive phase in all of them. This is associated with the gradual accumulation of BradiVRN1 transcripts, and the accessions exhibit a clear cold acclimation response by progressively accumulating proline, sugars and COR gene transcripts. However, whole-plant freezing tests show that the accessions only have a limited capacity to develop freezing tolerance when compared to winter varieties of temperate cereals such as wheat and barley. Furthermore, little difference in terms of survival is observed among the accessions tested despite their previous classification as either spring or winter genotypes.
William Salter
