Mathematical modelling of transcriptional regulation for plant cold response

Plants respond to their environment to survive and thrive, and they regulate the transcription of multiple genes to achieve this.

Temperatures in nature are often noisy and variable from year to year, but plants have developed mechanisms to cope with the current seasonal changes despite this noise.

Furthermore, accessions in different regions adjust these mechanisms to differently prepare for the winters they will typically face. However, with climate change these mechanisms are becoming less robust and so we need to better understand them in order to face this challenge.

My work combines experiments and mathematical modelling to investigate how the plant Arabidopsis thaliana perceives and responds to cold, and how the mechanisms it uses are set up in preparation for the seasonal signal.

In this talk, I will discuss the transcriptional regulation for plant cold response and then focus on the epigenetic regulation of the flowering gene FLC, which holds the memory of winter. I will describe what we have learned about this regulation in the setup phase, as well as during and after a prolonged cold period.

Mathematical models have been developed in this work for the temperature sensing and epigenetic regulation of this gene, which can predict its expression in field conditions and have given us a deeper understanding into the mechanisms of these processes.

Read more about Dr Antoniou Kourounioti's work