Abstract
Cold acclimation is the phenomenon in which plants increase in freezing tolerance upon exposure to low nonfreezing temperatures for an appropriate duration. Expression of cold-induced genes serves as a key during cold acclimation. In this study, we adopt an activation-tagging method to search novel Arabidopsis genes that are involved in cold acclimation.
We found that one of the mutants obtained, the line 18-16, possessed a significant capability of freezing tolerance: the survival rate of calli of the mutant was 13 times higher than that of the wild type at -15 oC. The analyses of Southern blot and TAIL-PCR revealed that only one copy of T-DNA was inserted near the genes of ACT7/2 and fibrillin-like protein (FIB) in the mutant. Furthermore, we made the mutants overexpressing the FIB gene, of which the calli showed a remarkable freezing tolerance.
