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Artificial Stress Hormones Could Help Protect Drought-Stricken Crops

It's not yet commercialized, but it could be an useful tool in climate-proofing food.
Photo: CraneStation/Flickr

Improving crop yields is one part of climate-proofing agriculture. Another big part is helping develop or find drought-resistant crop varieties, and making existing crops better able to withstand the drier conditions coming to many globally important agricultural areas. Biologists from the University of California, Riverside say they have part of that solution.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists describe how they have developed a synthetic alternative to the stress hormone abscisic acid, which plants naturally produce to help them cope during droughts. ABA controls the opening and closing of pores in plants, allowing them to take in carbon dioxide, and control the amount of water the lose through evaporation.

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Lead researcher Sean Cutler says, "It has been known for many years that simply spraying ABA on plants improves their water use and stress tolerance, but ABA itself is much too expensive for practical use in the field by farmers."

What Cutler's team has done is identify a synthetic chemical, which they've dubbed quinabactin, that mimics what ABA does. Though "almost indistinguishable" in effect from ABA, it's chemically simpler and easier to manufacture.

Cutler calls quinabactin a "landmark discovery," the "first in class synthetic molecule of its kind."

No word on when quinabactin may be commercialized, but UCR is partnering with agribusiness giant Syngenta Biotechnology to further develop it.

Via Cutler Lab/UC Riverside

It appears to work pretty well as is. In the photo at left, both soybean plants have not been watered for two weeks; the plant on the right has been treated with quinabactin.

It's an interesting development, to be sure. Perhaps it will become a useful tool in staving off crop loss due to likely rising extreme drought caused by climate change. It's too soon to say what the overall effect might be, but it does raise several questions.

For one, some consumers will surely wonder if crops treated with quinabactin will be considered organic. The answer is likely no, but as crop yields really start dropping, as temperatures rise and precipitation declines, boosting yields are going to become crucial. Plus, consider that—at least for some crops, corn in particular—organic agriculture already outperforms chemically-led agriculture in drought conditions due to better soil nutrient conditions.

More importantly, is this all we need to produce climate-resistant crops?

Not hardly. We're talking about our food supply, and the last thing we need is fewer options for the future, as biodiversity loss is already threatening our food supply.

Scientific advances, like this one as well as GMOs, may play a big part in our drought-laden future. At the same time (looking at corn again) conventional crop breeding techniques have led to greater crop yields under drought conditions (at lower cost) than have genetically modified versions.

The key, then, is to be flexible, and not just focus on specific varieties of crops that do well under current conditions. I'm thinking here of the recent example of how the Indian government to encourage farmers to grow a smaller variety of crops, to the detriment of local varieties. So while quinabactin appears to offer a fair bit of promise for the future, it's not the only answer.