Gene Expression of Arabidopsis thaliana in Response to Heat Stress

Event Center A & B

Unlike members of the animal kingdom, plants are immobile, meaning that they need a wide variety of mechanisms for dealing with stressors. Heat is one such stressor. Normally, heat will denature, or decrease functionality, of proteins. In order to lessen the effects of heat, plants use heat shock proteins (HSPs), whose function is to protect other proteins from being denatured. To make proteins, the cell first makes RNA from DNA. DNA, the genetic information storage medium of a cell, is then copied and modified into RNA. RNA is essentially a set of instructions for creating proteins. In order to monitor the expression (production) of these HSPs, we measure RNA levels by isolating RNA from heat-stressed leaves of the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. We are working with different lineages of Arabidopsis: wild-type and transgenic. Wild type is the unmodified plant that is found in nature, while the transgenic line has been modified to continuously produce a mitochondrial small HSP (sHSP). Our hypothesis is that in the transgenic lineage, continuous production of this mitochondrial sHSP is causing a significantly large increase in the expression of other HSPs, including the native nuclear gene that typically responds to heat stress.