Plants that Can Beat Drought
WASHINGTON: With arid zones expanding worldwide, scientists have created transgenic plants able to survive extreme drought and thrive on far less water in an encouraging potential boon to food production, new research showed on Monday.
The discovery could have important implications for food production and maintaining yields amid adverse conditions. “We hypothesized that it is possible to enhance the tolerance of plants of drought stress by delaying the drought-induced senescence of leaves during the drought episode,” wrote Rosa Rivero, one of the co-authors of the study. Senescence is the growth phase of a plant or its parts from maturity to death.
The study by Rivero, of the University of California, Davis, and Mikiko Kojima, of the RIKEN Plant Science Center in Yokohama, appears in the December 4 issue of the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’.
“Our hypothesis is that senescence is due to a type of cell death program that could be inappropriately activated in different plants during drought,” they wrote.
“Suppressing it could therefore enable plants to mount a vigorous acclimation response that would result in enhanced drought tolerance with reduced yield losses,” they explained.
The scientists carried out their studies by engineering transgenic tobacco plants.
“Production of drought-tolerant crops able to grow under restricted-water regimes without dimunition of yield would minimize drought-related losses and ensure food production in water-limited lands,” they said.
Sources: The Times Of India