Cold temperatures trigger the ICE1-CBF-COR transcriptional cascade in plants, which reprograms gene expression to increase freezing tolerance. In this issue of Developmental Cell, Ding et al. (2015) report that cold stress activates the protein kinase OST1 to phosphorylate and thereby stabilize and stimulate ICE1. This enhances plant tolerance to freezing temperatures.

Low temperature adversely affects crop yields by restraining plant growth and productivity. Most temperate plants have the potential to increase their freezing tolerance upon exposure to low but nonfreezing temperatures, a process known as cold acclimation. Various physiological, molecular, and metabolic changes occur during cold acclimation, which suggests that the plant cold stress response i...

Cold tolerance fundamentally affects world crop harvest. Ma et al. now identify a single-nucleotide polymorphism in a gene called COLD1 that confers cold tolerance in japonica rice. This study reveals important insights into agronomical traits that are essential for human nutrition.

BACKGROUND The Pyrrhocoris apterus (Insecta: Heteroptera) adults attain high levels of cold tolerance during their overwintering diapause. Non-diapause reproducing adults, however, lack the capacity to express a whole array of cold-tolerance adaptations and show relatively low survival when exposed to sub-zero temperatures. We assessed the competence of non-diapause males of P. apterus for resp...

OBJECTIVE This study examined whether increasing the demand for central cognitive processing involved in a distraction task, by involving the child in ongoing, effortful interaction with the distraction stimulus, would increase children's tolerance for cold pressor pain. METHODS Seventy-nine children ages 6-15 years underwent a baseline cold pressor trial followed by two cold pressor trials i...

Low temperature is one of the key environmental stresses, which greatly affects global banana production. However, little is known about the global phosphoproteomes in Musa spp. and their regulatory roles in response to cold stress. In this study, we conducted a comparative phosphoproteomic profiling of cold-sensitive Cavendish Banana and relatively cold tolerant Dajiao under cold stress. Phosp...

Cold environment is the main constraint for tea plants (Camellia sinensis) distribution and tea farming. We identified two tea cultivars, called var. sinensis cv. Shuchazao (SCZ) with a high cold-tolerance and var. assamica cv. Yinghong9 (YH9) with low cold-tolerance. To better understand the response mechanism of tea plants under cold stress for improving breeding, we compared physiological an...

Low temperature is one of the major environmental stresses that affects plant growth and development, and leads to decrease in crop yield and quality. Thellungiella salsuginea (salt cress) exhibits high tolerance to chilling, is an appropriate model to investigate the molecular mechanisms of cold tolerance. Here, we compared transcription changes in the roots and leaves of T. salsuginea under c...

Citation: Zhao Q, Xiang X, Liu D, Yang A and Wang Y (2018) Tobacco Transcription Factor NtbHLH123 Confers Tolerance to Cold Stress by Regulating the NtCBF Pathway and Reactive Oxygen Species Homeostasis. Front. Plant Sci. 9:381. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2018.00381 Tobacco Transcription Factor NtbHLH123 Confers Tolerance to Cold Stress by Regulating the NtCBF Pathway and Reactive Oxygen Species Homeost...

Cold temperatures trigger the expression of the CBF family of transcription factors, which in turn activate many downstream genes that confer freezing tolerance to plants. It has been shown previously that the cold regulation of CBF3 involves an upstream bHLH-type transcription factor, ICE1. ICE1 binds to the Myc recognition sequences in the CBF3 promoter. Apart from Myc recognition sequences, ...