Seeds and stress: integration of endogenous and environmental signals in multiple adaptive response pathways

Resumo

The term “stress” is widely used in relationship with plants, but there is no evidence at all of plants suffering any stress. The application of the term to the plant sciences is metaphorical, but nevertheless it helps to reveal new aspects of plant physiology, especially concerning environmental adaptation and responses during seed germination. New DNA sequences, not previously reported for Arabidopsis, or in plants, and even not similar to any sequences reported in databases, were identified as being expressed during germination of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, suggesting that complex genome dynamics operate in this process. The mRNA encoding prohibitin was identified as up-regulated during germination. It contains features suggesting that it may be involved in translational control. Seeds are fascinating systems to study genome dynamics and translational control.