the progeny of arabidopsis thaliana plants exposed to salt exhibit changes in dna methylation, histone modifications and gene expression拟南芥植物的后代表现出盐dna甲基化的变化,组蛋白修饰和基因表达.pdfVIP

The Progeny of Arabidopsis thaliana Plants Exposed to Salt Exhibit Changes in DNA Methylation, Histone Modifications and Gene Expression 1 1 2,3 1 Andriy Bilichak , Yaroslav Ilnystkyy , Jens Hollunder , Igor Kovalchuk * 1 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, 2 Department of Plant Systems Biology, Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, 3 Department of Molecular Genetics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Abstract Plants are able to acclimate to new growth conditions on a relatively short time-scale. Recently, we showed that the progeny of plants exposed to various abiotic stresses exhibited changes in genome stability, methylation patterns and stress tolerance. Here, we performed a more detailed analysis of methylation patterns in the progeny of Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) plants exposed to 25 and 75 mM sodium chloride. We found that the majority of gene promoters exhibiting changes in methylation were hypermethylated, and this group was overrepresented by regulators of the chromatin structure. The analysis of DNA methylation at gene bodies showed that hypermethylation in the progeny of stressed plants was primarily due to changes in the 5 9 and 39 ends as well as in exons rather than introns. All but one hypermethylated gene tested had lower gene expression. The analysis of histone modifications in the promoters and coding sequences showed that hypermethylation and lower gene expression correlated with the enrichment of H3K9me2 and depletion of H3K9ac histones. Thus, our work demonstrated a high degree of correlation between changes in DNA methylation, histone modifications a