Unlike animals, plants cannot move to escape from environmental stress, but rather develop strategies to acquire environment-dependent adaption.Wounding is a general inducer of cell reprogramming at the excision site, which triggers the transition of differentiated plant cells into stem cells and new organs.For example,when stem cells in the shoot or root apex of the angiosperm are destroyed, the peripheral cells are reprogrammed to establish a new stem cell niche.Intact plants also face various stresses in nature,such as the chilling, heavy metal, or oxidative stresses that can cause DNA strand breaks.However, the mechanisms by which plants respond to and survive in these stressful conditions remain poorly understood.In a recent study, Gu et al.(2020) discovered a DNA damage-induced and wounding-independent mechanism that mediates cell reprogramming and stem cell generation in the moss Physcomitrella patens.