Cold stress effects plant growth and gene expression.

<p>(A) Exposure of maize seedlings to cold stress resulted in leaf lesions visible after two days of recovery. A B73 leaf not exposed to cold stress is shown on the left and cold-stressed B73 leaf is shown on the right. (B) Seedlings subjected to cold stress showed decreased growth as measured on the 7^th day of recovery (p-value <0.05; 20 plants were measured for each condition; standard error is shown with vertical lines). Similar decreases in growth and fitness were detected for three other stress conditions. (C) Abiotic stress exposure results in up- or down-regulation for numerous maize genes in each genotype. The log₂(stress/control) values for all differentially expressed FGS genes were used to perform hierarchical clustering of the gene expression values. The genotypes (B73 - B, Mo17 - M, and Oh43 - O) and stress treatments are indicated below each column.