SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

Epigenetics, a relatively new field of research, has been found to have an increasing role in the pathogenesis of different diseases cancer onset, neurological disorders, and immunological problems. Different from classical Mendelian genetics, epigenetics can lead to genome-related functional changes without nucleotide sequence alternations. Because the main epigenetic regulations like histone modification and DNA methylation are evolutionarily conserved across higher eukaryotes, plants have been suggested as the potential model to unravel epigenetic pathways that are incompletely understood in animal models. Environmental changes constantly bring more attention to the issue of global warming, which negatively affects plant development and crop growth. With the concern of such a problem, this signature work tries to provide new insights into the epigenetic-related pathways exhibited by plants to counter heat stress. The traditional plant model for genetic research, Arabidopsis thaliana, is applied as the experimental subject. In the process, two honozygote mutants with heat resistant ability have been isolated, which both have mutations on proteins related to chromatin remodeling. The results of this project are expected to contribute to the engineering of heat-tolerant crops that will mitigate the food shortage problem raised by global warming.