Plants Exposed to Drought Adapt Response to Dry Conditions

Plants that have endured drought conditions are able to “remember” the stress of dehydration and to adapt responses to future dry conditions, a new study says. Working with Arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family, scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that plants for which water was withheld over an extended period recovered more quickly to dry conditions than plants that had not experienced dehydration stress. Specifically, they found that “trained” plants respond to subsequent dehydration by increasing the transcription of a certain subset of genes. “All of this is driven by events at the molecular level,” said Zoya Avramova, a plant molecular biologist. “We demonstrate that this transcriptional memory is associated with chromatin changes that seem to be involved in maintaining this memory.” According to the scientists, these findings could help in the development of more drought-resistant crops. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.