Special Issue on "New insights into the regulation of plant aging and senescence"

Aging is age-associated changes of organism’s biological functions toward death. In plants, aging is also associated with the age-dependent senescence and death of the cells, tissues, organs, or the entire organism. Remarkably, plants show a vast diversity of aging processes at the cellular, tissue, organ, organismal, and population levels. Typical organ aging and senescence are observed in autumn leaves. At the organismal level, annual plants live for a few months, whereas a certain population of trees lives longer than 10,000 years. In addition, while aging is generally regarded as a biological process with functional and organizational declines in animals, plant aging and senescence involve highly organized regulatory mechanisms as a critical evolutionary strategy for fitness, which is evident in remobilization of nutrients and energy from a source (leaves) to a sink (seeds) during aging and senescence of annual plants such as rice. Thus, understanding the regulatory mechanism of plant aging and senescence is not only fundamental in understanding aging mechanism in general but also critical for improvement of crop yield and quality and of food self-life and for global ecological processes. The regulatory network of plant aging and senescence is multilayered and multidimensional, integrating various endogenous and exogenous signals as well as the age of organs and/or organism.

This special issue is aimed to gather and highlight current advances in plant aging and senescence including physiological, genetic, and molecular mechanisms with the multi-layered, multi-dimensional regulatory pathways and their evolutionary implications in the form of research and/or review articles. In addition, future perspectives regarding new concepts, technologies and approaches regarding plant aging and senescence and its implication in animal aging can be also addressed in the form of reviews.

Topics include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Physiological aspects of plant aging at the cellular, tissue, organ, organismal, and population levels
2. Big-data analysis of physiological and molecular aspects of plant aging including next generation sequencing, phenome, geo-ecological analysis
3. Multi-layered and temporal regulation of plant aging
4. Regulation of plant aging by internal/external factors:
   - Hormonal regulation of plant aging
   - Light signaling and plant aging
   - Biotic & abiotic stress-related aging process
5. Plant aging and nutrient recycling
6. Translational aspects of plant aging and senescence:
   - Crop productivity
   - Storage life and quality
7. Ecology of plant aging and senescence
8. Comparison of aging mechanisms in plants and animals
9. New technological and conceptual advances
10. Theoretical and evolutionary aspects including modeling.

Submission deadline: 31 October 2018

Editor:

• Hong Gil Nam, Center for Plant Aging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Daegu, Korea. Department of New Biology, DGIST, Daegu, Korea
  Email:nam@dgist.ac.kr
   

Guest Editors:

• Hyo Jung Kim, Center for Plant Aging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Daegu, Korea.
  Email:florigen76@gmail.com
• Yun Ju Kim, Center for Plant Aging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Daegu, Korea.
  Email: yjkim77@ibs.re.kr