Scientists Reveal Underpinnings of Drought Tolerance in Plants

Public Release: June 11, 2015
The Plant Cell
Scientists Reveal Underpinnings of Drought Tolerance in Plants
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.
Contact:
Tyrone Spady, PhD
Director of Legislative and Public Affairs
American Society of Plant Biologists
tspady@aspb.org
301-251-0560 ext. 121
Scientists Reveal Underpinnings of Drought Tolerance in Plants
Genome-wide analysis elucidates drought-tolerance system in Arabidopsis
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. NamChon 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 seedlings after recovery from
drought stress. Wild type on left, nac016
Arabidopsis thaliana was the first plant to have its genome
mutants on right.
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 droughttolerant crops.
Author:
Nancy R. Hofmann, PhD nhofmann@aspb.org
Science Editor, The Plant Cell
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9504-1152
Tel: 575-571-8926
###
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 researchers: To arrange an interview with Dr. Nam-Chon Paek of Seoul National University, please
contact ncpaek@snu.ac.kr.
About The Plant Cell: Published monthly by ASPB, The Plant Cell (http://www.plantcell.org/) is the highestranking 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
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Figure credit: Nam-Chon Paek.
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Key words: Drought, drought tolerance, plant science, agriculture, Arabidopsis, water, crop
yield, genome