New discovery by Laurier researcher may help plants be more resilient to warming climate
Posted Jul 11, 2022 08:45:00 PM.
You're not the only one sweating when it gets too hot out — plants become more in danger of infectious diseases.
These are plants we depend on for food and bioenergy.
When temperatures get too high, certain plant defences don't function as well, leaving them more susceptible to attacks from pathogens and insect pests.
A team of researches, including a Laurier professor, say they've discovered why this happens, as well as a way to make plants stronger against the heat.
This could be good news for insecure food supplies caused by climate change.
“Plant infectious diseases already account for a 20 to 30-per-cent reduction in annual agricultural yields globally,” said Danve M. Castroverde, a professor of biology at Wilfrid Laurier University.
“Then for every one degree Celsius increase in global temperatures, we will see an additional annual reduction of 10 to 30 per cent. That’s quite an impending problem, especially if we want to safeguard global food security for this generation and the next.”
Authors of the new study say they've identified a specific protein in plant cells that acts as a “master switch” for a plant's immune system.
They studied the “lab rat” of plants, which is a spindly plant with white flowers, called Arabidopsis thaliana.
It turns out that many of the genes that were suppressed when temperatures got too high were regulated by the same molecule, a gene called CBP60g.
CBP60g “turns on” the proteins that enable a plant cell to make a defence hormone, called salicylic acid.
Researchers found a way to engineer heat-resilient plants that turned on the CBP60g “master switch” only when under attack, while not stunting plant growth.
This is critical in helping to protect plant defences without negatively impacting crop yields.
The next step is seeing if results with Arabidopsis thaliana also hold up with crops.
In order to have enough food for the estimated 10 billion people on Earth by 2050, it's forecasted food production will need to go up by 60 per cent.
