from the instant-drought-tolerance...just-add-water dept.
Even under normal circumstances, drought is a regular occurrence in agricultural regions. Several human-driven trends, from groundwater depletion to climate change, are expected to aggravate natural water shortages. While crops can't be expected to be very productive during times of drought, it might be possible to at least get them to better tolerate short periods of water scarcity without dying.
Efforts to that end have largely focused on traditional breeding between commercial crops and drought-tolerant relatives. But researchers are now reporting progress with an alternative approach: genetic engineering. They have taken a signaling network that plants normally use to respond to stresses such as lack of water and have rewired it so that it responds to a molecule that's normally used to kill fungus.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/plants-engineered-for-on-demand-drought-tolerance/
[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14123.html
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 05 2015, @09:03AM
So now they add another reason to put poison on the plants.
What did they say it is normally triggered on?
So in other words, in a drought it is activated anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by moondrake on Thursday February 05 2015, @10:45AM
I briefly skimmed through the paper. Its interesting, though not for the reasons the press seems to cite it.
This will not directly make all our crops drought tolerant. Plants already produce the hormone ABA in response to drought. ABA induces a lot of responses (closing of stomata, leaf wilting, production of osmotic protectant proteins, etc). Only a few of these are well understood. But it is not the response to ABA itself that makes some species very drought tolerant, it is what they do in response to ABA. Doing more of a not so useful thing is not going to help you.
The paper is interesting because it allows us to intervene in the drought-response process though (we could already do this by giving ABA or inhibitors, but we could not yet make, on demand at least, the plants more sensitive to ABA). This however, does not necessarily mean we make plants do better under drought by just spraying this stuff around. ABA production and sensitivity is likely to be, in most plants, quite well regulated to do what it is supposed to do: make sure the plants survives drought long enough to produce offspring. Although there are certainly situations in which you may be able to save a plant by making the response stronger, the system is far more complex than that. It is comparable to a doctor giving you a drug that increases fever so your body can fight more effectively against an infection (I guess it is obvious why this could be counterproductive).
In the paper, they show "increased survival" of some Arabidopsis plants under drought after inducing a stronger ABA sensitivity. This was not a field trail, it was not even a very nice physiological experiment (these people are molecular biologist and thus the measurements of physiology consists of taking some pictures and judging things by eye. They did not even measure a parameter that could quantify how much "drought" the different plants experienced. The grouping in pots means they actually have only 3 independent reps, as far as I can understand from a quick long. As usual, Nature is doing a bad job on making people do proper experiments). Apart from the somewhat unrealistic way drought-stress was applied here, an obvious practical problem of this method would be that the closure of stomata after the treatment prevents water loss, but also increases leaf temperature by about 4 degC in their experiments. This probably had little effect under the relatively cool temperatures that they kept the plants at, but could be devastating from plants growing at warmer temperatures.