'Animal-stress' signal improves plant drought resilience
2021-03-29
(Press-News.org) A team of Australian and German researchers has discovered a novel pathway that plants can use to save water and improve their drought tolerance.
The research published today in Nature Communications shows that the molecule GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), most commonly associated with relaxation in animals, can control the size of the pores on plant leaves to minimise water loss.
Matthew Gilliham, Director of the Waite Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, who led the research team, said they found: "GABA minimised pore openings in a range of crops such as barley, broad bean and soybean, and in lab plants that produce more GABA than normal. This led to the lab plants using less water from the soil and surviving longer in the drought experiments."
"We found plants that produce lots of GABA reduce how much their pores open, thereby taking a smaller breath and reducing water loss."
In an earlier study, members of the team found that GABA - known as a nerve signal in animals - could act as plant GABA receptors. This led to renewed speculation that GABA could be a signal in plants as well as in animals.
Lead author on the study, Dr Bo Xu, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology adds: "Both plants and animals produce GABA and they put it to different uses. Plants don't have nerves, instead they appear to use GABA to match their energy levels with their response to the environment."
"GABA doesn't close pores on leaves like other stress signals, it acts in a different way - how much a plant accumulates GABA when it is stressed determines how much it applies the brake pedal to reduce the pore opening the following morning, and water loss that day - like a stress memory of the day before."
Professor Rainer Hedrich at the University of Würzburg, a pioneer in studying how plants regulate water loss, led the German component of the study.
"I've been studying how plants regulate their stomatal pores for over 35 years. To find a completely new and unexpected way that they are regulated has certainly been one of our most surprising discoveries. I look forward to seeing how this translates out in the field."
The team recently received a new grant from the Australian Federal Government to partner with researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, and are looking for new PhD students to join the team to discover new components of the signalling pathway and to trial its impact in crops.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-29
Each human being is made of billions of cells. In order to ensure his survival, cells must coordinate with each other and attach in the right place to perform their tasks. Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in collaboration with the University of Tampere in Finland, have highlighted the key role of a protein called paxillin, which enables cells to perceive their environment and anchor at the right place with the help of cellular "crampons". Indeed, without functional paxillin, the cell is unable to attach properly and slips continuously. These results, to be read in the journal Communications Biology, shed new light ...
2021-03-29
Noninfluenza respiratory viral infections (NIRV) are associated with illness and death rates similar to influenza in hospitalized adults, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
In a study of 2119 adults admitted to two hospitals over three seasons (2015-2018) in Edmonton, Alberta, and Toronto, Ontario, with confirmed viral acute respiratory infections, more than half (54.6%) were NIRV infections compared with influenza viruses (45.4%). Among patients with NIRV infections, 21.1% needed respiratory support, 18.2% required lengthy hospital stays and 8.4% died within 30 days of diagnosis. About 15% of NIRV infections were acquired in hospital.
"These findings show that clinical ...
2021-03-29
A new study finds that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to speed up tropical forest recovery on post agricultural land. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
In the study, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawai`i spread 30 dump truck loads of coffee pulp on a 35 × 40m area of degraded land in Costa Rica and marked out a similar sized area without coffee pulp as a control.
"The results were dramatic" said Dr Rebecca Cole, lead author ...
2021-03-29
Twenty percent of high school students have easy access to a handgun, according to a new study from the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
In the study published today in The Journal of Pediatrics, the researchers examined the prevalence of handgun access among adolescents in Colorado and explored individual and geographic characteristics, as well as related health factors.
"Our findings highlight that it is relatively easy to access a handgun in Colorado for high school students. This finding, combined with ...
2021-03-29
Growing cities tend to run out of land for waste management and new landfill sites.
Artificial Intelligence can help city managers create more powerful long-term forecasts of solid waste volumes and landfill requirements, even with missing or inaccurate data.
UJ researchers found that a 10-neuron model produced the best 30-year forecast for municipal solid waste in a growing city.
All over the world, large cities are running out of space for municipal solid waste. Existing landfill sites are rapidly filling up and no-one wants a new site anywhere near their homes or businesses. Meanwhile, taxpayers aren't interested in higher costs for quality waste management either.
One way of significantly extending ...
2021-03-29
Groundbreaking research from the University of South Australia has delivered world-first national-level guidelines to better inform children's physical activity and screen time in Outside School Hours Care (OSHC).
Developed with input from the OSHC sector, the guidelines aim to address growing concerns of children's sedentary behaviour marked by an increase in regular screen time. Research shows that 31-79 per cent of OSHC sessions are sedentary.
The guidelines specifically encourage energetic play while discouraging screen use:
Before School Care should schedule 45 minutes of physical activities and no more ...
2021-03-29
Arctic habitats have fascinated biologists for centuries. Their species-poor insect faunas, however, provide little reward for entomologists - scientists who study insects - to justify spending several weeks or even months in the hostile environments of tundra or polar deserts. As a result, data on insects from the High Arctic islands are often based on occasional collecting and remain scarce.
Vize Island, located in the northern part of the Kara Sea, is one of the least studied islands of the Russian High Arctic in terms of its biota. Scientists Dr Maria V. Gavrilo of the Arctic ...
2021-03-29
WATERLOO, Ontario, March 29, 2021--A newly-published paper represents one of the most comprehensive reviews of advancements to come in contact lenses, catapulting the commonly-used medical device to applications well beyond refractive error correction.
Contact Lens Technologies of the Future (Jones L, et al.) is now in press from Contact Lens and Anterior Eye, the peer review journal of the British Contact Lens Association (BCLA). It joins nine other papers being printed in next month's special edition as part of the BCLA-led Contact Lens Evidence-based Academic Reports (CLEAR) series.
"There are a range of ...
2021-03-29
Bioengineering researchers at Lehigh University have identified a previously unknown interaction between receptors in human cells and the spike, or "S," protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This new information could aid in the development of new strategies to block SARS-CoV-2 entry into human cells.
X. Frank Zhang and Wonpil Im knew from recent studies that the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors in human cells is stronger than the interaction between the structurally identical spike protein of SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, and the same receptors.
"Our goal was to characterize SARS-CoV-2 ...
2021-03-29
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Monitoring the progression of multiple sclerosis-related gait issues can be challenging in adults over 50 years old, requiring a clinician to differentiate between problems related to MS and other age-related issues. To address this problem, researchers are integrating gait data and machine learning to advance the tools used to monitor and predict disease progression.
A new study of this approach led by University of Illinois Urbana Champaign graduate student Rachneet Kaur, kinesiology and community health professor Manuel Hernandez and industrial ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] 'Animal-stress' signal improves plant drought resilience
