Scientists Reveal Basis Of Drought Tolerance In Plants
June 16, 2015 Regions all over the globe are suffering from severe drought, which threatens crop production worldwide. This is especially worrisome given the need to increase, not just maintain, crop yields to feed the increasing global population.
A team of researchers from Seoul National University in Korea has analyzed Arabidopsis thaliana plants mutated in a regulatory gene called NAC016 and found that the NAC016 mutant plants were more resistant to drought.
The researchers set out to understand how this drought tolerance came about by comparing the set of expressed genes (the transcriptome) in the mutants to that in normal (so-called wild-type) plants.
The lead researcher, Dr. NamChon Paek states “We all expect that drought will be the major challenge for crop production in the near future. Understanding drought-responsive signaling and the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of drought tolerance in model plants such as Arabidopsis and rice provide new insight into how to develop drought-tolerant crop plants through conventional breeding or biotechnological approaches.”
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