Researchers Improve Drought Tolerance In Plants

Researchers at the University of CaliforniaÐ'-Riverside have found yet another way to improve a crop's ability to survive drought, raising hope that more food can be grown in arid regions of the developing world.

"This discovery will assist farmers who depend on rainwater for their crops during those years when rainfall is low ... and should help farmers who grow crops in arid areas such as exists in many third-world countries," said Daniel R. Gallie, a biochemistry professor at the University of CaliforniaÐ'-Riverside and an author of a scientific paper recently published in The Plant Cell.1

Gallie and biochemistry Professor Zhong Chen have discovered that reducing a tobacco plant's ability to recycle vitamin C causes it to scale back the amount of water that escapes from its leaves. That, in turn, allows the plant to better survive drought conditions.

Tobacco was used in the study because it's very sensitive to drought, but "our discovery should be applicable to most if not all crop species, as the role of vitamin C is highly conserved among plants," said Gallie in a press release from the University of CaliforniaÐ'-Riverside.2

Improving plants' ability to survive drought has long been a Holy Grail for plant researchers. And the UCÐ'-Riverside discovery is just one of several promising biotech breakthroughs.

In 2002, researchers at Cornell University in New York used a different scientific approach to develop a hardier biotech rice that can resist drought and thrive in marginal soil.

In the Cornell study, researchers took the genes that synthesize trehalose Ð'-- a simple sugar that is produced in a wide variety of plants, including the resurrection plant Ð'-- and inserted them into rice. The resurrection plant is a desert moss that can slow its activity to zero