Drought tolerance in crops: Shutting down the plant's growth inhibition under mild stress

Seed Daily: VIB/UGent researchers have unveiled a mechanism that can be used to develop crop varieties resistant to mild droughts. For years, improving drought tolerance has been a major aim of academic and industrial research, thereby focusing on effects of extreme drought stress.

However, translating this research to the field has proven to be problematic. In a set of papers in Nature Biotechnology and the Plant Cell, the team of Dirk Inze at the VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology, UGent now shows that the focus should be on mild drought stress instead.

It turns out that under non-lethal stress conditions plants inhibit growth more than absolutely necessary, opening new opportunities for yield improvement. "By applying this knowledge to the selection of new crop varieties, unnecessary yield losses through drought stress can be avoided, resulting in higher productivity," Dirk Inze from VIB-UGent said.

…One way to increase crop productivity is targeting drought stress, which is currently the main factor decreasing actual yields. Research in this area however so far largely failed to result in crops that perform better in drought conditions. Much of this research has focused on improved plant survival under very severe drought. However, as shown by Aleksandra Skirycz and Korneel Vandenbroucke, plants that are more likely to survive these extreme conditions do not grow better under more mild drought conditions.

This is important as in the field drought rarely is severe enough to kill plants, but rather affects their growth. The paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, also shows that plants actively choose to grow slower when water gets limiting, although they have enough resources to keep growing….

Dry barren field near to West Acre Norfolk in the UK, shot by Keith Evans, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license