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Peptide signal alerts plants to drought

It is thought that plants sense water availability in the soil as a way of anticipating drought. The identification of a peptide expressed when water is scarce offers a chance to unravel the underlying molecular mechanism.
  1. Alexander Christmann

    1. Alexander Christmann is in the Department of Plant Sciences, Technical University of Munich, 5354 Freising, Germany.

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  2. Erwin Grill

    1. Erwin Grill is in the Department of Plant Sciences, Technical University of Munich, 5354 Freising, Germany.

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Because plants cannot move to escape unfavourable conditions, they must continuously monitor environmental cues to survive when conditions change. Plants can sense interactions with other organisms, such as bacteria, and can monitor light conditions across the spectrum, from ultraviolet to far red. The molecular mechanisms that facilitate those capacities are well understood. But how plants sense drought, cold and salt has remained an enigma1. In a paper in Nature, Takahashi et al.2 report the identification of a peptide that is generated in response to a water deficit in plants.

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Nature 556, 178-179 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-03872-4

References

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