Plant responses to high temperature: a view from pre-mRNA alternative splicing

Key message This review focused on the recent breakthroughs in plant high temperature responses from an alternative splicing angle. With the inevitable global warming, high temperature triggers plants to change their growth and developmental programs for adapting temperature increase. In the past decades, the signaling mechanisms from plant thermo-sensing to downstream transcriptional cascades have been extensively studied. Plenty of elegant review papers have summarized these breakthroughs from signal transduction to cross-talk within plant hormones and environmental cues. Precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) splicing enables plants to produce a series of functional un-related proteins and thus enhances the regulation flexibility. Plants take advantage of this strategy to modulate their proteome diversity under high ambient temperature and elicit developmental plasticity. In this review, we particularly focus on pre-mRNA splicing regulation underlying plant high temperature responses, and will shed new light on the understanding of post-transcriptional regulation on plant growth and development.