Strawberry fields forever? Scientists to study how crops remember environmental stress

As crops are threatened by climate change and the increased frequency of unexpected heat waves, understanding how they respond and adapt to these conditions is becoming increasingly important for ensuring food and nutrition security.

To assist with this, a team from the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences will examine how plants such as tomatoes and strawberries activate molecular mechanisms that allow them to thrive in the face of repeated heat stress.

Led by Dr Claudia Martinho and supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award of just under £1 million, the team will determine how plants store information about past heat waves through chemical modifications written on their DNA. The five-year study will also attempt to determine how these molecular memories are established and maintained over time.

“Plants are wonderful organisms with the ability to remember past environmental experiences,” said Dr Martinho, an expert in plant genetics and epigenetics at Dundee.

“The question of how they store this information, reproduce it through cell division, and sometimes even transmit it to the next generation has really captured my imagination. These intricate molecular mechanisms represent one of the fundamental unanswered questions in plant biology,” 

“As humans, if our skin is burned by the sun, we use that experience to take preventative measures in the future. Plants are similar in that they too learn from past experiences and prime their genes to better respond to future stresses.

“Unlike animals, plants can maintain some molecular changes in DNA associated with environmental experiences. These modifications can determine how genes are activated or repressed in response to stress. More incredibly, some plant species can respond better after their first exposure to environmental stress, so are primed to deal with whatever challenge they face.”

Dr Martinho and her colleagues will focus their five-year project on strawberries and tomatoes, two hugely popular fruits that form a large part of British agriculture, diet and nutrition. Both are particularly sensitive to heat, with strawberries reproducing asexually to produce genetically identical copies and tomatoes propagated by seed. Studying both species will enable the team to investigate different forms of stress memory, providing insight into how plants maintain and transmit responses to heat across different modes of propagation and reproduction.

“Last summer we saw a big drop in barley production in the UK and we know other crops are at risk,” added Dr Martinho.

“By the end of this project we would be looking to have developed an understanding of the mechanisms that develop plant resilience. Doing so could be an important step in ensuring the security of not just strawberries and tomatoes, but a multitude of crops that we depend upon.”