由低温导致的逆境胁迫是农作物最主要的自然灾害之一，对农业和社会造成极大损失。位置不能移动迫使植物进化形成了多种复杂灵活的响应机制，其中选择性剪接就是植物应对低温等环境胁迫的一种重要手段。通过选择性剪接，数目有限的遗传位点可以产生无限可能性的功能性产物。参与RNA前体选择性剪接的剪接（辅助）因子，其基因自身及其靶基因也会产生复杂的选择性剪接。许多冷胁迫应答相关基因都有选择性剪接现象，并且冷胁迫也可以诱导多个胁迫应答基因发生选择性剪接，但关于选择性剪接产物的功能研究较少。本申请基于此前研究剪接因子ROA1调控植物脱落酸信号转导途径之工作基础上的新发现：ROA1基因表达受低温处理诱导，其功能缺失突变体对低温异常敏感。因此，研究ROA1参与调控冷胁迫应答可以进一步揭示选择性剪接在植物应对逆境胁迫中的重要作用，从而为培育抗低温农作物提供理论基础。

Plants are immobile and bound to adapt themselves to stress conditions. Low temperature, one of the major environmental stresses for crop plants, significantly constraints the agricultural productivity by adversely affecting the growth and development of crop plants. Increasing evidences proposed that post-transcriptional alternative splicing (AS) plays a vital role in plant response to various abiotic stresses. AS generates multiple transcripts from the same genetic locus and hence produces potentially different protein isoforms for expanding proteomic diversity and functional complexity. Several cold-stress responsive genes were reported to be involved in cold signaling by AS and transcriptional regulation of splicing factors, which compose the main functional component of the spliceosome. Recently, few splicing-related RNA-binding proteins including splicing factors were reported to be involved in plant stress responses. However, the mechanisms how splicing factors control RNA processing of their target genes and the functional analysis on how AS variants regulate stress signaling are far from understanding. We have reported that splicing factor ROA1 regulates abscisic acid signaling by control AS of protein phosphatase 2C HAB1 gene, then we found quickly responsive chilling hypersensitivity due to defect of ROA1 gene, which expression can be induced by cold stress. We hypothesized that ROA1 is responsible for splicing of some vital cold-responsive genes, and this is what we try to consider in this proposal. This study of the mechanism how ROA1 involve in plant cold stress response by control AS of its targets will be important and necessary for selecting genotypes with superior performance under low temperature conditions and for the engineering of cold-tolerant crop plants.