USA
June 12, 2015
Arabidopsis seedlings after recovery from drought stress. Wild type on left, nac016 mutants on right. - Credit: Nam-Chon Paek.
Drought is one of the most urgent environmental crises facing the world today. In new work reported in The Plant Cell, scientists from Korea used a genome-wide approach to studying drought tolerance in plants and identified regulatory pathway that can be used to increase drought tolerance.
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. Over the course of evolution, plants have developed mechanisms to adapt to periods of inadequate water, and as any gardener can tell you, some species are better able to handle drought than others. Accordingly, scientists have invested much effort to understand how plants respond to drought stress and what can be done to increase the drought tolerance of economically important plants. As Dr. Nam-Chon Paek of Seoul National University in Korea stated, “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.”
Arabidopsis thaliana was the first plant to have its genome sequenced. Dr. Paek is the senior author of a paper to be published this week in The Plant Cell that takes advantage of the genetic resources in this model species to reveal important underpinnings of drought responses in plants. Dr. Paek’s research group analyzed 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. According to Dr. Paek, “Genome-wide transcriptome analysis using drought-tolerant or -susceptible variants is a promising method to reach the goal of understanding drought tolerance". In this case, the scientists discovered that NAC016 is part of a mechanism to turn off responses to drought. This is important because in the wild, plants likely evolved to keep the drought-response pathways inactive until needed so that they could save the energy the responses would require. For agricultural purposes, though, the ability to control when the pathway is on would be a great boon to developing drought-tolerant crops.
This research was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) (NRF-2011-0017308)
Full citation: Sakuraba, Y., Kim, Y.-S., Han, S.-H., Lee, B.-D., and Paek, N.-C. (2015). The Arabidopsis Transcription Factor NAC016 Promotes Drought Stress Responses by Repressing AREB1 Transcription through a Trifurcate Feedforward Regulatory Loop Involving NAP. Plant Cell 10.1105/tpc.115.00222.
Publication date: June 9, 2015, at http://www.plantcell.org/content/early/2015/06/09/tpc.15.00222.abstract
About The Plant Cell: Published monthly by ASPB, The Plant Cell (http://www.plantcell.org/) is the highest- ranking primary research journal in plant biology. The Plant Cell publishes novel research in plant biology, especially in the areas of cellular biology, molecular biology, genetics, development, and evolution. The primary criteria for publication are that the article provides new insight that is of broad interest to plant biologists, not only to specialists, and that the presentation of results is appropriate for a wide audience.
About ASPB: ASPB is a professional scientific society, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, devoted to the advancement of the plant sciences worldwide. With a membership of almost 5000 plant scientists from throughout the United States and more than 50 other nations, the Society publishes two of the most widely cited plant science journals: The Plant Cell and Plant Physiology. For more information about ASPB, please visit http://www.aspb.org/. Also follow ASPB on Facebook at facebook.com/myASPB and on Twitter @ASPB.
Figure credit: Nam-Chon Paek.
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