How to generate plants resistant to drought without harming their growth

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How to generate plants resistant to drought without harming their growth







One of the effects of climate change that is currently being felt is extreme drought. This same year, the decrease in rainfall and the high temperatures in northern and eastern Europe have caused large losses in crops of cereals, potatoes and other horticultural species.



Experts have long warned that to ensure the availability of food will be necessary to use plant varieties that are productive in drought conditions.



Now, a team led by the researcher of the Center for Research in Agrigenomics (CRAG) (Spain) Ana Caño-Delgado has achieved plants more resistant to drought by modifying the signaling of plant steroid hormones, called brassinosteroids. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to find a strategy to increase the resistance of the plant to water stress without affecting growth.



Ana Caño-Delgado has been studying for more than 15 years how plant steroids, brassinosteroids, regulate the development and growth of the plant model par excellence, Arabidopsis thaliana. It is known that these phytohormones bind to different receptors of cell membranes, causing a signaling cascade inside the cell that will end up producing effects such as elongation or cell division.







The discoveries of Ana Caño-Delgado's team open a door to obtaining plants that are more resistant to drought. (Photo: Olga Moreno Pradas, CRAG)



Since 2016 and thanks to a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), your laboratory uses this knowledge to find strategies to increase the resistance of plants to drought. By modifying signaling by brassinosteroids, the researchers had so far achieved arabidopsis plants more resistant to drought, but due to the complex action of these hormones on the growth of the plant, the plants resistant to water stress were much smaller than the plants. respective controls.



In the work now published in Nature Communications, researchers have studied drought resistance and the growth of Arabidopsis thaliana plants with mutations in the different brassinosteroid receptors. Thanks to this detailed study, researchers have discovered that plants that over-express the BRL3 brassinosteroid receptor in vascular tissue are more resistant to the lack of water than control plants and that, unlike the other mutants, they do not present defects in its development and growth.



"We have discovered that modifying the signaling of brassinosteroids only locally in the vascular system, we achieve that the plant is more resistant to drought and grows the same as non-modified plants", explains Caño-Delgado.



Thus, the researchers of the CRAG in collaboration with researchers from Europe, the United States and Japan, analyzed the metabolites of genetically modified plants and showed that the arabidopsis with more BRL3 receptor produced more osmeoprotective metabolites (sugars and proline) in the aerial parts and in the roots under normal irrigation conditions.



When these plants were exposed to drought conditions, these protective metabolites quickly accumulated in the roots, protecting them from drying out. In this way, the over-expression of the BRL3 receptor prepares the plant for the drought situation -primary effect-, which can be compared with the effect of vaccines, which prepare the body to deal with pathogens.



Although this discovery has been made with a small herb used as a model plant, the Arabidopsis thaliana, the research team led by Caño-Delgado is already working on applying this strategy in plants of agronomic interest, especially in cereals.



"Drought is one of the most important problems in today's agriculture. So far the efforts that have been made in biotechnology to produce plants more resistant to drought have not been very successful because as a counterpart to an increase in resistance to drought there was always a decrease in plant growth and productivity. It seems that we have finally found a strategy that could be applied and we want to continue exploring it ", concludes Caño-Delgado. (Source: Agrigenomics Research Center)

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