Study: Plants Can be 'Reprogrammed' for Drought Tolerance
8 February 2015 01:14 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A team of scientists led by Sean Cutler at the University of California, Riverside discovered a way to ‘reprogram’ drought-threatened crops to increase its survival, ENN reported. The study results is published on online Nature journal on February 4.
When plants encounter drought, they naturally produce abscisic acid (ABA), a stress hormone that inhibits plant growth and reduces water consumption. Human can help crops survive drought by spraying the crops with ABA, but it has several drawbacks such as costly to make, rapidly inactivated inside plant cells and light-sensitive.
Sean’s team worked with Arabidopsis, a model plant used widely in plant biology labs, and the tomato plant. In the lab, they used synthetic biological methods to develop a new version of these plants’ abscisic acid receptors, engineered to be activated by mandipropamid --an agrochemical widely-used in agricultural production to control late blight of fruit and vegetable crops-- instead of ABA.
The researchers showed that when the reprogrammed plants were sprayed with mandipropamid, the plants effectively survived drought conditions by turning on the abscisic acid pathway, which closed the stomata on their leaves to prevent water loss.
“We successfully repurposed an agrochemical for a new application by genetically engineering a plant receptor – something that has not been done before,” said Cutler, an associate professor of botany and plant sciences as quoted by ENN.
“We anticipate that this strategy of reprogramming plant responses using synthetic biology will allow other agrochemicals to control other useful traits – such as disease resistance or growth rates, for example.”
ENN