ArticlePLoS genetics2021
RNA-directed DNA methylation prevents rapid and heritable reversal of transposon silencing under heat stress in Zea mays.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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22 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- DNA methylation either antagonizes or promotes Polycomb recruitment at transposable elements in Arabidopsis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Advances in the study of the role of epigenetic mechanisms in plant growth and response to stress.Horticulture research · 2026Article
- Transposon expansion is associated with reorganization of small RNA and DNA methylation landscapes in the morphologically minimal angiosperm Wolffia brasiliensis.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2026Article
- Epigenetic regulation under light and temperature fluctuations: chromatin remodeling and transcriptional memory in plants.Plant cell reports · 2026Review
- Decades' progress and prospects on maize functional genomics and molecular breeding.Science China. Life sciences · 2025Review
- Uncovering the multi-layer cis-regulatory landscape of rice via integrative nascent RNA analysis.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Effects of Methyl Farnesoate on the Growth and Antioxidant Capacity ofAntioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Heat stress response and transposon control in plant shoot stem cells.Plant physiology · 2025Article
- Alternative silencing states of transposable elements in Arabidopsis associated with H3K27me3.Genome biology · 2025Article
- DNA methylation analysis reveals local changes in resistant and susceptible soybean lines in response to Phytophthora sansomeana.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Article
- Predicting Differentially Methylated Cytosines in TET and DNMT3 Knockout Mutants via a Large Language Model.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Transcriptomic and epigenetic responses shed light on soybean resistance to Phytophthora sansomeana.The plant genome · 2024Article
- Heritable changes of epialleles near genes in maize can be triggered in the absence of CHH methylation.Plant physiology · 2024Article
- Barley AGO4 proteins show overlapping functionality with distinct small RNA-binding properties in heterologous complementation.Plant cell reports · 2024Article
- The Genomic Shock Hypothesis: Genetic and Epigenetic Alterations of Transposable Elements after Interspecific Hybridization in Plants.Epigenomes · 2023Review
- Maize heat shock proteins-prospection, validation, categorization and in silico analysis of the different ZmHSP families.Stress biology · 2023Article
- Epigenetic Regulation During Plant Development and the Capacity for Epigenetic Memory.Annual review of plant biology · 2023Review
- Genome Size Changes by Duplication, Divergence, and Insertion in Caenorhabditis Worms.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- A Molecular Cloning and Sanger Sequencing-based Protocol for Detecting Site-specific DNA Methylation.Bio-protocol · 2022Article
- Biogenesis, Trafficking, and Function of Small RNAs in Plants.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In large complex plant genomes, RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) ensures that epigenetic silencing is maintained at the boundary between genes and flanking transposable elements. In maize, RdDM is dependent on Mediator of Paramutation1 (Mop1), a gene encoding a putative RNA dependent RNA polymerase. Here we show that although RdDM is essential for the maintenance of DNA methylation of a silenced MuDR transposon in maize, a loss of that methylation does not result in a restoration of activity. Instead, heritable maintenance of silencing is maintained by histone modifications. At one terminal inverted repeat (TIR) of this element, heritable silencing is mediated via histone H3 lysine 9 dimethylation (H3K9me2), and histone H3 lysine 27 dimethylation (H3K27me2), even in the absence of DNA methylation. At the second TIR, heritable silencing is mediated by histone H3 lysine 27 trimethylation (H3K27me3), a mark normally associated with somatically inherited gene silencing. We find that a brief exposure of high temperature in a mop1 mutant rapidly reverses both of these modifications in conjunction with a loss of transcriptional silencing. These reversals are heritable, even in mop1 wild-type progeny in which methylation is restored at both TIRs. These observations suggest that DNA methylation is neither necessary to maintain silencing, nor is it sufficient to initiate silencing once has been reversed. However, given that heritable reactivation only occurs in a mop1 mutant background, these observations suggest that DNA methylation is required to buffer the effects of environmental stress on transposable elements.
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