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Crop News: Drought-tolerant Crops Move Closer to Becoming Reality

by Kathy Jones on  August 27, 2010 at 11:08 PM Environmental Health
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A synthetic chemical that mimics a naturally produced stress hormone in plants to help them cope with drought conditions has been discovered by scientists.
 Crop News: Drought-tolerant Crops Move Closer to Becoming Reality


Led by researchers at The Medical College of Wisconsin, the researchers found that by understanding how pyrabactin works, other more effective chemicals for bringing drought-resistance to plants can be developed more readily.

Plants naturally produced a stress hormone, abscisic acid (ABA), in modest amounts to help them survive drought by inhibiting growth. ABA has already been commercialized for agricultural use. But it has at least two disadvantages: it is light-sensitive and costly to make.

Pyrabactin, on the other hand, is relatively inexpensive, easy to make, and not sensitive to light. But its drawback is that, unlike ABA, it does not turn on all the "receptors" in the plant that need to be activated for drought-tolerance to fully take hold.

A receptor is a protein molecule in a cell to which mobile signaling molecules - such as ABA or pyrabactin, each of which turns on stress-signaling pathways in plants - may attach.

Usually at the top of a signaling pathway, the receptor functions like a boss relaying orders to the team below that then proceeds to execute particular decisions in the cell.

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