ABSTRACT
Environmental stress is a daily fact of life that most organisms, and especially plants, must be able to cope with to survive. The seasonal wax and wane of temperature in temperate regions of the world is an obvious example of a cyclic environmental parameter. When a cell experiences a rapid increase in temperature, at about 10°C above the initial temperature, a dramatic change in protein synthesis is observed. Plant responses to low temperature are perhaps more complex than for high temperature because of the varied nature of low-temperature stresses. The conservation of the cold stress, cold-shock response in plants and other organisms is completely opposite that of the heat-shock response. A great deal of the information available on the genomic organization of heat-shock genes comes from the study of bacteria and yeast. The organization of cold stress genes in the genomes of plants is not well characterized for even a single species.
