Two Triacylglycerol Lipases Are Negative Regulators of Chilling Stress Tolerance in Arabidopsis

Cold stress is one of the abiotic stress conditions that severely limit plant growth and development and productivity. Triacylglycerol lipases are important metabolic enzymes for the catabolism of triacylglycerols and, therefore, play important roles in cellular activities including seed germination and early seedling establishment. However, whether they play a role in cold stress responses remains unknown. In this study, we characterized two Arabidopsis triacylglycerol lipases, MPL1 and LIP1 and defined their role in cold stress. The expression of and is reduced by cold stress, suggesting that they may be negative factors related to cold stress. Indeed, we found that loss-of-function of and resulted in increased cold tolerance and that the double mutant displayed an additive effect on cold tolerance. We performed RNA-seq analysis to reveal the global effect of the and mutations on gene expression under cold stress. The mutation had a small effect on gene expression under both under control and cold stress conditions whereas the mutation caused a much stronger effect on gene expression under control and cold stress conditions. The double mutant had a moderate effect on gene expression under control and cold stress conditions. Together, our results indicate that MPL1 and LIP1 triacylglycerol lipases are negative regulators of cold tolerance without any side effects on growth in Arabidopsis and that they might be ideal candidates for breeding cold-tolerant crops through genome editing technology.