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Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning

Nature Genetics volume 39, pages 1309–1310 (2007)Cite this article

A new study provides insight into the way plants integrate information from the environment to anticipate the onset of winter. Plants are able to combine information about light quality and ambient temperature to activate the cold- acclimation pathway.

Being rooted to the spot, plants are vulnerable to changes in their environments. Temperature in particular is quite challenging and can easily fluctuate within a 40 °C range in temperate climates. Although plants are largely unable to modulate their core temperature, they are far from passive participants, deploying an impressive range of signaling pathways to sense change in temperature and adjust many aspects of their growth and development accordingly1,2. Forewarned is forearmed, and recent work is revealing a fascinating degree of complexity by which plants sense, and attempt to anticipate, changes in temperature during the seasons and the day-night cycle. On page 1410 of this issue, Franklin and Whitelam3 add a valuable piece to the jigsaw, showing that information from two key pathways in environmental sensing—light quality and ambient temperature—are integrated to enable the expression of genes that confer resistance to freezing temperatures in Arabidopsis thaliana. The study shows that although either decreased ambient temperature or low light quality alone is unable to activate the cold-acclimation pathway, the combination of these two signals protects plants from freezing. The authors suggest that this may reflect an adaptive mechanism by which plants are able to sense the encroaching winter during autumn, when twilight increases (that is, the average light quality decreases) and the temperature starts to drop.

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Figure 1: Phytochromes have a central role in coordinating responses to both light quality and the pathway that senses ambient temperature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vinod Kumar and Philip A. Wigge are in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, Norwich NR4 7UH, UK. philip.wigge@bbsrc.ac.uk,

    Vinod Kumar & Philip A Wigge

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  1. Vinod Kumar
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Kumar, V., Wigge, P. Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. Nat Genet 39, 1309–1310 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1107-1309

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