Abstract
Overwintering plants are capable of exhibiting high levels of cold tolerance, which is acquired through cold acclimation. It was reported that plants have common cold tolerance mechanisms with prokaryotes. They are post-transcriptional or translational regulation mechanisms, which control mRNA structure and stability. Recently degradation mechanisms of RNA by miRNA or siRNA are well studied, however stabilization mechanism of mRNA is not fully understood during cold stress adaptation or deacclimation step. In order to understand this system during cold stress, we focus on the RNA masking system, which is a translational regulation mechanisms involved in RNA silencing and stability. Translational masking of RNA is a system to control protein expression by repressing translation. As the first step to understand the RNA masking system, we performed comparative analysis between transcriptome and proteome to identify the targets of RNA masking. According to these analyses we identified several candidates of RNA masking targets.
