Negative evidence on the transgenerational inheritance of defense priming in Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

Defense priming allows plants to enhance their immune respon-ses to subsequent pathogen challenges. Recent reports suggested that acquired resistances in parental generation can be inherited into descendants. Although epigenetic mechanisms are plausible tools enabling the transmission of information or phenotypic traits induced by environmental cues across generations, the mechanism for the transgenerational inheritance of defense priming in plants has yet to be elucidated. With the initial aim to elucidate an epi-genetic mechanism for the defense priming in plants, we reas-sessed the transgenerational inheritance of plant defense, how-ever, could not observe any evidence supporting it. By using the same dipping method with previous reports, Arabidopsis was exposed repeatedly to Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000 (Pst DC3000) during vegetative or reproductive stages. Irrespec-tive of the developmental stages of parental plants that received pathogen infection, the descendants did not exhibit primed resis-tance phenotypes, defense marker gene (PR1) expression, or ele-vated histone acetylation within PR1 chromatin. In assays using the pressure-infiltration method for infection, we obtained the same results as above. Thus, our results suggest that the previous observations on the transgenerational inheritance of defense pri-ming in plants should be more extensively and carefully reassessed. [BMB Reports 2022; 55(7): 342-347]