Scientists uncover how plants respond to drought at the molecular level

The sagging and drying of plant leaves suggests that we should water them, but how do plants respond to drought at the molecular level? Scientists at the Salk Institute have recently made a major breakthrough on this issue. This finding might help agricultural production adapt to adverse climates such as drought. The study was published in the Nov. 4 issue of Science. Studies have shown that in the face of unfavorable natural conditions, a small part of the plant proteins would act as a "command" to regulate the complex stress response. These experimental results were conducted using recombinant dog proteins and are expected to contribute to the development of new technologies for improving the use efficiency of plant water.

"At the molecular level, the response of plant to stress is a complex process involving hundreds of genes," said Joseph Ecker, author of the paper. "We have discovered a class of regulatory proteins that play a key role in plant responses to stresses such as drought. And if we can control a regulator protein, it's the equivalent of controlling all the genes it regulates."

Plant roots and leaves would secrete abscisic acid when water is scarce or salinity is high. "Only twenty or several regulatory proteins control the expression of hundreds or even thousands of genes," said Liang Song, the first author of the paper. "By identifying key regulatory proteins and studying their mechanisms of action, we can gain a deeper understanding and even regulate plant responses to stress."

In the experiments, the team at the Salk Institute tracked real-time changes in gene expression during plant secretion of abscisic acid and identified key regulatory proteins. These proteins control plant response to drought stress conditions such as stress response. By locating the binding sites of these regulatory proteins to DNA, they identified key proteins that can regulate gene expression networks, which can efficiently elicit a stressful response to environmental changes. This group focused on studying some of the known regulatory proteins that respond to abscisic acid.

During the experiment, they obtained 122 data sets containing 33,602 genes, of which 3061 genes had at least one time point of change in the expression intensity. Data analysis revealed a multi-level regulatory mechanism, in which regulatory proteins play a key role in gene expression regulation. Interestingly, the binding pattern of a protein at a particular time in DNA can explain much of the expression of a gene over a longer period of time. These kinetic properties together reveal that plant responses to environmental stimuli are a genome-wide synergistic response.

"Based on the understanding of the network structure, we found that a single key regulatory protein can control multiple components, which means that gene regulation is an accurate and interrelated process." Song said. "This is important for agriculture because it suggests that the control of one gene can activate or inhibit another set of genes, making it possible to design a human intervention program as a whole." This study suggests that this multi-level synergistic gene activity may be widespread in flower plants. Flarebio offers good-quality recombinant proteins such as recombinant CDH15 at good prices.