Research underway right here in San Diego could soon protect crops from drought all around the world. In a recently published study, co-author Joseph Swift, Ph.D., a visiting researcher at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, says drought directly impacts the rate at which plants age.
“Plants have a very flexible schedule where they can progress more quickly if they’re in an environmental stress,” Swift said.
Through their research, Swift and Professor Joe Ecker, Ph.D., found that when plants, even your house plant, don’t get the water they need, it’s like they freeze and don’t grow.
“The plant is at the molecular level moving much faster towards an aging and dying profile,” Swift said.
In their labs at The Salk Institute, Swift and Ecker manipulated very small changes in water, which led them to their discovery.
“Through very small changes in water, we were able to detect those genes that we found to be really important,” Swift said.
The plant in question is the Arabidopsis thaliana, a small, weedy plant that serves as the reference point in plant biology.
“Sort of the lab rat of the plant world,” Ecker calls it.
Ecker says they analyzed millions of different cells in this plant that has been responding to drought over time in the lab. Now others can use this data, too.
“Essentially, what we built is a resource that all investigators can access through the web, and this can be used by other investigators studying different plants to discover how they respond to drought,” Ecker said.
Their findings here could mean a higher yield in crops like rice and wheat. That’s a win for farmers whose bounty depends on good or bad water years, as areas across the country continue to face more extreme weather patterns.
“So if we can help stop that process in the field, then that gives farmers more time and the plant more time to wait for water to continue grow,” Swift said.
He added that if these changes can be incrementally made, then that will allow farmers to benefit from stable yields with less water input.