The finding:
As climate change begins to diminish yields for food crops such as rice and wheat, just how plants detect small changes in temperature has become a hot topic. To address this, S. Vinod Kumar and Philip Wigge at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, increased the temperature in Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings from 12°C to 27°C and looked for plants that didn’t show the usual response to heat, such as flowering. A genetic screen of the anomalous plants revealed a mutation in ARP6, a gene that controls the insertion of the histone H2A.Z into nucleosomes, suggesting that ARP6 uses H2A.Z to release the genes that respond to warming.
The surprise: Researchers had observed that the H2A.Z histone replaces the H2A histone in some nucleosomes, but “no one knew what the ...
