Search for a command to run...
Climate change impacts crop productivity due to worsening environmental conditions, such as unexpected low temperatures or herbivory. To combat these stresses, plants evolved a variety of defense mechanisms that include physical or chemical defenses and growth modulation. These alterations depend on molecular and biochemical responses, such as gene regulation, hormone signaling, and metabolite production. Cytochrome P450s (CYPs) are a superfamily of enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of many protective secondary metabolites that are induced by environmental stresses. Specifically, the CYP72A subfamily has been shown to possess functional diversity among flowering plants that correlates to their diverse metabolomes. Our work aims to understand how one CYP72A gene called CYP72A124 allows maize (Zea mays) to respond to environmental stressors. We hypothesized that under specific environmental conditions, the gene will be induced in maize. After finding that cold stress induces CYP72A124, we tested the role of the gene in cold stress tolerance using Arabidopsis thaliana mutants overexpressing CYP72A124. The CYP72A124ox plants were subjected to cold stress to test the expression of cold stress-related genes and measure other cold tolerance phenotypes relative to wild type Arabidopsis plants. We found that CYP72A124 confers cold stress resistance in Arabidopsis overexpression mutants, improving our understanding of the contributions of the CYP72A124 in plant stress acclimation.