A recent discovery at the University of California, Riverside, could help researchers develop new drought-tolerant crops.
The work coming out of Sean Cutler’s laboratory is still new, but it may provide the agriculture industry with a blueprint for further innovations that allow farmers worldwide to get the most out of crops growing under less-than-ideal conditions.
A plant that encounters drought tries to cope with the stress by ceasing growth and reducing water loss and consumption.
In short, it has a defence mechanism to help it survive the stress. Cutler’s team has discovered how to heighten that response.
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“If we want to feed the 10 billion people that we’re going to have in the near future, we need to be actively making discoveries like this that create new options down the line,” said Cutler, an associate professor of plant cell biology at the university.
The research builds on previous studies into abscisic acid, a stress hormone triggered when a plant encounters drought. In 2009, Cutler assisted in the discovery of abscisic acid receptors, which are activated by the hormone and control a plant’s response to drought.
“The receptor is like the conductor,” said Cutler. “It controls the whole orchestra that does all these responses.”
With that knowledge Cutler went to work “supercharging” the plant’s stress response, modifying these receptors so that they can be turned on at will and locked in their “on” state to improve stress tolerance.
“If you can modify the plant so that it lasts just a few days longer under conditions of drought than other varieties, then when the water does come back — when the rain does return — you can improve the amount of yield that the farmer gets out at the end of the day,” said Cutler.
The results of his study , which was funded by the National Science Foundation and Syngenta Biotechnology, were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December.
Cutler’s team examined Arabidopsis, a close relative of canola and a plant beneficial to researchers be-cause it grows quickly, but he said the research is applicable to all plants.
“These hormones and the ways that plants cope with these stresses are shared by all plants,” said Cutler.
“So new information from corn can be relevant for wheat. New information from canola or our plant … can be extremely informative for the crops that farmers care about.”
Cutler said it will be many years, if ever, before the research hits the field. The team still has to show that supercharging these responses will improve yields in crop plants.
“But we’ve shown that we know how to do that, and other work has shown that supercharging by other tricks can improve yield,” Cutler said.
“And so we’re moving toward that next step.”
Other research, including drought tolerant corn developed by Mon-santo and BASF, is further along the pipeline.
“The goal is not to turn corn or wheat into a cactus-like plant. It’s to broaden the range of environments it can be productive in and maximize the yield when conditions aren’t ideal,” said Cutler.
