UC San Diego

As climate change continues to progress, improving plants’ resilience to drought becomes increasingly important to protecting food security. Despite extensive knowledge about the molecular mechanisms of drought response in plants, we still lack efficient solutions for protecting plants from drought stress while maintaining normal growth levels. Drought recovery is a stage of drought resilience that is understudied but could elucidate a new path toward engineering drought resilient crops. We proposed to try to express drought resilience-related genes in a cell-type-specific manner. To this end, we used Gateway cloning to engineer candidate drought recovery genes, expressed in a cell-type-specific manner in Arabidopsis thaliana. This approach will allow us to identify a combination of gene x cell-type that enhances drought resilience without stunting growth under well-watered conditions. In this study, we generated and validated 37 Cell-typepro::GENE-mCitrine constructs. We transformed 30 of these constructs into Arabidopsis thaliana, harvested T1 seeds from all 30 genotypes, and harvested T2 seeds from 12 genotypes. Kanamycin selection and mCitrine genotyping suggest successful transformation across all genotypes. However, this validation is based on a small sample size and requires additional validation. These engineered lines can be further investigated to identify genes that selectively improve drought resilience when acting in specific cell types. Effective lines have the potential to be engineered into crops to protect global food security.