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JXB Advance Access originally published online on November 2, 2008
Journal of Experimental Botany 2008 59(15):4161-4170; doi:10.1093/jxb/ern257
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© 2008 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper is available online free of all access charges (see http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/open_access.html for further details)

RESEARCH PAPER

Leaf cold acclimation and freezing injury in C3 and C4 grasses of the Mongolian Plateau

Mei-Zhen Liu1,2 and Colin P. Osborne2,*

1State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China
2Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: c.p.osborne{at}sheffield.ac.uk

The scarcity of C4 plants in cool climates is usually attributed to their lower photosynthetic efficiency than C3 species at low temperatures. However, a lower freezing resistance may also decrease the competitive advantage of C4 plants by reducing canopy duration, especially in continental steppe grasslands, where a short, hot growing season is bracketed by frost events. This paper reports an experimental test of the hypothesis that cold acclimation is negligible in C4 grasses, leading to greater frost damage than in C3 species. The experiments exposed six C3 and three C4 Mongolian steppe grasses to 20 d chilling or control pre-treatments, followed by a high-light freezing event. Leaf resistance to freezing injury was independent of photosynthetic type. Three C3 species showed constitutive freezing resistance characterized by <20% leaf mortality, associated with high photosynthetic carbon fixation and electron transport rates and low leaf osmotic potential. One freezing-sensitive C4 species showed the expected pattern of chilling-induced damage to photosynthesis and >95% leaf mortality after the freezing event. However, three C3 and two C4 species displayed a cold acclimation response, showing significant decreases in osmotic potential and photosynthesis after exposure to chilling, and a 30–72% reduction of leaf freezing injury. This result suggested that down-regulation of osmotic potential may be involved in the cold acclimation process, and demonstrated that there is no inherent barrier to the development of cold acclimation in C4 species from this ecosystem. Cold acclimation via osmoregulation represents a previously undescribed mechanism to explain the persistence of C4 plants in cool climates.

Key words: C3 photosynthesis, C4 photosynthesis, chilling, cold acclimation, electron transport rate, freezing injury, leaf mortality, Mongolian Plateau, osmotic potential

Received 23 July 2008; Revised 22 September 2008 Accepted 23 September 2008


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