The Effects of Abiotic Stress on Alternative Splicing in Non-specific Lipid Transfer Proteins in Marchantia polymorpha

Abstract: Due to global warming, our planet will experience more extreme weather conditions. Plants can protect themselves against these abiotic stress conditions with their stress response, which includes alternative splicing of certain genes. Alternative splicing is a post-transcriptional process where a single gene gives rise to different mRNAs, which in turn produces different proteins. In plants, this is usually done by intron retention. One type of protein that may be involved in this stress response are the non-specific lipid transfer proteins (LTPs). Indeed, evidence of intron retention has been found in the LTP genes in the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, called MpLTPd. To investigate whether this alternative splicing is caused by abiotic stress or not, I subjected the moss to two different types of stress trials, drought and cold, and compared the general expression of the intron in MpLTPd2 and MpLTPd3 from the stressed samples to samples from a moss grown under normal conditions. I found that the expression of the intron did change in the stressed moss, but none of the differences were significant. This suggests that alterative splicing in MpLTPd2 and MpLTPd3 is not caused by cold and drought and that the intron-containing protein plays no role in the protection of M. polymorpha against abiotic stress.