Toronto, Ontario, Canada
April 30, 2009
A team of scientists from Canada,
Spain and the United States has identified a key gene that
allows plants to defend themselves against environmental
stresses like drought, freezing and heat.
"Plants have stress hormones that they produce naturally and
that signal adverse conditions and help them adapt," says team
member Peter McCourt, a professor of cell and systems biology at
the University of Toronto.
"If we can control these hormones we should be able to protect
crops from adverse environmental conditions which is very
important in this day and age of global climate change."
The research team, led by Sean Cutler of the University of
California, Riverside, has identified the receptor of the key
hormone in stress protection called abscisic acid (ABA). Under
stress, plants increase their ABA levels, which help them
survive a drought through a process not fully understood. The
area of ABA receptors has been a highly controversial topic in
the field of plant biology that has involved retractions of
scientific papers as well as the publication of papers of
questionable significance. A receptor is a protein molecule in a
cell to which mobile signaling molecules may attach. Usually at
the top of a signaling pathway, the receptor functions like a
boss relaying orders to the team below that then executes
particular decisions in the cell. "Scientists have been trying
to solve the ABA receptor problem for more than 20 years, and
claims for ABA receptors are not easily received by the
scientific community," says Cutler.
This team used a new approach called chemical genomics to
identifying a synthetic chemical, designated pyrabactin, which
specifically activates an ABA receptor in the model laboratory
plant Arabidopsis. With pyrabactin in hand it was now possible
to directly identify the ABA receptor. "This approach not only
found a gene that had been long sought by the plant science
research community but also showed that chemical genomics can
identify new chemicals like pyrabactin that may have profound
impacts on the way we farm in both the developing and developed
world," says McCourt.
The study results will appear April 30 in
Science Express and in the May 22 issue of
Science magazine. Lead
author Sean Cutler is a former University of Toronto scientist
who is now an assistant professor of plant cell biology in the
Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of
California, Riverside. In addition to the University of Toronto
and the University of California, Riverside, team members were
from University of California, San Diego, Universidad
Politecnica, Spain, the University of Ontario Institute of
Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara; and the
Medical College of Wisconsin.
Research was funded by the Canada Research Chair program, the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. |
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