Selaginella sellowii Transcriptome or Gene expression
Vegetative desiccation tolerance (VDT) allows resurrection plants to survive extreme water loss, yet its system-level regulation remains incomplete. Here we interrogated the VDT landscape in Selaginella sellowii using time-series RNA-seq and a computational pipeline integrating ensemble network inference, graph attention networks (GATs), and protein language models (PLMs). Our analysis revealed two distinct strategies for dehydration tolerance based on stress severity. Intermediate dehydration elicits a complex transcriptional response associated with active damage control, while extreme dehydration shifts to a minimalist, sta-ble transcriptome. Network analysis identified 12 persistent regulators bridging quiescence and recovery. GAT embedding further demonstrated that these regu-lators undergo context-specific functional reprogramming to drive rapid cellular reconstruction. This study establishes a regulatory blueprint for VDT, identify-ing key mechanisms linking quiescence to coordinated recovery and providing a robust methodological framework for decoding complex gene regulatory networks (GRNs).