environmental and local hypoxia in Arabidopsis thaliana

The number of flooding events is predicted to be increasing in the future, framing flooding stress as a major challenge for agriculture. Indeed, yield losses caused by these events peak every year in billions of dollars. To reach the global goal of enhancing stress tolerance of crops, scientific community is deeply studying plant response to low oxygen. Since the last decade, hypoxia has been often associated to a detrimental aspect of flooding stress. Lately, evidences are pointing toward the involvement of hypoxia in many aspect of the plant beyond the flooding response, from plant development to response to pathogens. In this work we analyse two aspects of hypoxia established on the plant. The first regards hypoxia as a microenvironment settled upon pathogen infection and the role of a transcription factors’ family during the early infection. The second aim to understand if the effect of a prolonged flooding condition, applied for several generations on a plant, could lead to the establishment of a stress-related memory.