Although they do it differently than humans, plants also have memories. For example, many plants can sense and remember prolonged cold in the Winter to ensure they flower at the right time during the Spring. This so-called ‘epigenetic memory’ occurs by modifying specialized proteins called histones, which are important for packaging and indexing DNA in the cell. One such histone modification, called H3K27me3, tends to mark genes that are turned off. In the case of flowering, cold conditions cause H3K27me3 to accumulate at genes that control flowering. Previous work from the Berger lab has shown how H3K27me3 is faithfully transmitted from cell to cell so that in the Spring, plants will remember that it was cold and that winter is over, allowing them to flower at the right time. But just as importantly, once they’ve flowered and made seeds, the seeds need to forget this ‘memory’ of the cold so that they do not flower too soon once winter comes around again. Since H3K27me3 is faithfully copied from cell to cell, how do plants go about forgetting this memory in seeds?
Click here for original story, How plants forget: New work uncovers how epigenetic marks are specifically reset in sperm
Source: Phys.org