Opinion: Non-model plants as windows into complex epigenetic adaptation

Plants thrive in constantly changing environments through remarkable trait plasticity, enabling rapid physiological and developmental adaptation to stress. Beyond immediate responses, chromatin regulation provides a mechanism for long-term stress memory via epigenetic changes, allowing plants to “remember” previous environmental challenges. These discoveries have inspired the development of epi-bred and epi-trained plants, in which stable or heritable epigenetic modifications are selected or induced to enhance adaptive traits without altering DNA sequences. Central to these processes are chromatin-based mechanisms, including histone post-translational modifications, ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling complexes, and histone-modifying enzymes that dynamically regulate chromatin accessibility and transcriptional responses in response to fluctuating environmental conditions. Gadri and colleagues emphasized that most current knowledge derives from model diploid species and does not fully capture the genomic complexity, polyploidy, and ecological diversity of non-model plants, where phenotypic plasticity is often highly polygenic. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning models integrating epigenomic and histone modification datasets, now provide powerful tools to predict chromatin remodeling events and uncover regulatory patterns in non-model species, opening new opportunities to decode adaptive plasticity and accelerate climate-resilient crop improvement. (Summary by Ching Chan @ntnuchanlab @ntnuchanlab.bsky.social) Plant Cell Environ. 10.1111/pce.70584