Vernalisation in Arabidopsis thaliana : investigating how COOLAIR is induced in response to cold temperature

Doughty, Jade (2019) Vernalisation in Arabidopsis thaliana : investigating how COOLAIR is induced in response to cold temperature. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Arabidopsis thaliana, a winter annual, requires a period of prolonged cold to permit flowering, in a process known as vernalisation. Vernalisation results in the transcriptional shutdown and epigenetic silencing of a locus encoding the floral repressor, FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC). Relatively little is known about the thermosensors involved in relaying a prolonged cold temperature signal into silencing of FLC, however it is known that COOLAIR, a set of antisense long non‐coding RNAs (lncRNAs), and VIN3 are both transcriptionally upregulated in response to weeks of cold.
The aim of my work described in this thesis was two‐fold, to firstly identify the potential factors involved in COOLAIR induction and secondly to investigate the thermosensory inputs to COOLAIR induction, in an effort to identify how prolonged cold temperature is being sensed at COOLAIR.
In summary, a non‐biased forward genetic screen mutant analysis identified candidate thermosensors required for the cold induction of COOLAIR, including ARP6, a core component of a histone remodelling complex. A complementary reverse genetic approach, formulated based on cis sequence conservation in the COOLAIR promotor, identified known cold affected redundant factors that may activate COOLAIR expression in response to cold temperature. I also carefully designed temperature regimes to more accurately represent fluctuating field temperatures, to ascertain the temperature inputs being detected at COOLAIR. Experiments tracking COOLAIR expression under different temperature regimes isolated likely distinct temperature inputs at COOLAIR contributing to a distributive view of thermosensing. This work has provided much scope for further investigations that could ultimately lead to the characterisation of thermosensing during vernalisation.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	24 Jan 2020 10:11
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2020 10:11
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/73777
DOI:

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