Maternal environmental effects and climate-smart seeds: unlocking epigenetic inheritance for crop innovation in the seed industry

Abstract

Seed production is facing a three-fold challenge: ensuring food security, maintaining sustainability, and adapting to climate change. Although most efforts have focused on genetic breeding and crop management, additional levers need to be explored to optimize plant tolerance to the accelerating climate change. A groundbreaking approach will be to capitalize on the ability of plants to naturally adjust their responses to fluctuating environments during the crop cycle and transmit stress-induced information to the next generation(s). This viewpoint aims at highlighting the potential application of maternal stress memory as a priming strategy to produce primed seedlots. This requires identifying the priming conditions among stress memory scenarios, defined according to the starting point of the new generation within the plant, that is, the fertilization. If the contribution of stress-induced epigenetic-associated mechanisms in inheritance patterns to promote germination and early growth development has been evidenced, the whole picture is not fully understood. Further investigations are required to characterize the maternally inherited plant stress imprints leading to higher stress tolerance of seedlots. Detailed characterization of the mechanisms of stress-induced maternally heritable seed traits could provide novel targets for the seed industry and open new avenues to deploy the potential of maternal stress memory for enhancing seed performances.