UC San Diego

In nature, plants are continuously subjected to various abiotic stresses, such as drought, cold or high salinity. In agriculture, one of the most destructive abiotic stresses is drought, which is becoming an increasingly important problem due to climate change and increasing water scarcity. In agriculture, drought stress has a heavy impact on crop yields and overall crop health, representing a problem with major economic ramifications. As such, development of novel methods for drought-tolerant crops becomes a foremost solution for farming in increasingly arid conditions.

In this study, we looked into knocking down known negative regulators of the drought signaling pathway to generate more drought tolerant plants for both Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica napus. We generated constructs allowing stress inducible and constitutive knockdowns A.thaliana and stress inducible knockdowns of PP2Cs in B.napus. We found that for both stress inducible and constitutive A. thaliana knockdown lines allowed enhanced ABA responsiveness in germination. By developing a well-controlled low moisture assay, we were able to demonstrate thatstress inducible and ubiquitous knockdown lines in A.thaliana had increased drought tolerance. In B.napus stress inducible lines, we found some variability in the insertional strength, with only some lines showing enhanced ABA responsiveness, but enhanced drought responsiveness is still uncertain. This research demonstrates the use of knocking down specific negative regulators in the drought signaling pathway in order to generate more drought tolerant plants.