https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2447-6161
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Yunqing Yu, Diverse Strategies Coping with Winter in Barley and its Relatives, Plant Physiology, Volume 180, Issue 1, May 2019, Pages 5–6, https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.19.00333
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The Poaceae is one of the largest plant families in angiosperms, containing more than 12,000 grass species, which are classified into two major clades: 1) Panicoideae, Arundinoideae, Chloridoideae, Micrairoideae, Aristidoideae and Danthonioideae and 2) Bambusoideae, Oryzoideae and Pooideae (Fig. 1; Kellogg, 2015). The Poaceae originally evolved in warm moist habitats, and further successfully adapted to a worldwide range of climatic regimes from tropics to temperate zones including freezing Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems. Two subfamilies, Pooideae and Danthonioideae, predominantly occupy the temperate zones of the Northern and Southern hemisphere, respectively (Kellogg, 2015). The Pooideae is one of the most species-rich Poaceae subfamilies, containing economically important cereal crops such as wheat (Triticum aestivum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and oats (Avena sativa). Cold tolerance in the Pooideae involves cold acclimation (adaptation to freezing temperatures by pre-exposure to short periods of nonfreezing temperatures in the autumn) and vernalization (flowering after exposure to prolonged cold temperature in early spring). It has been hypothesized that cold adaptation was acquired before or during the early radiation of the Pooideae, which would reasonably result in cold tolerance for the whole subfamily (Zhong et al., 2018). In this issue of Plant Physiology, Schubert et al. (2019) show that gene expression in response to cold stress in diverse Pooideae species is largely species specific, supporting an alternative hypothesis that cold adaptation of the Pooideae occurred after species diversification.
