Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yang, Xiaohan
• Cushman, John C
• Borland, Anne M
• Liu, Qingchang

Titel

Editorial: Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology in Relation to Drought Tolerance or Avoidance in Plants

Ist Teil von

• Frontiers in plant science, 2020-04, Vol.11, p.394-394

Ort / Verlag

Switzerland: Frontiers Research Foundation

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Drought stress has been a long-time limitation to crop production that is being exacerbated by climate change and associated reductions in the availability of blue water resources for agriculture. Most existing food and industrial crops are susceptible to drought stress, which can cause a significant loss in crop yield. Therefore, our ability to develop more climate-resilient crops that are more heat and drought tolerant will become increasingly important in the near future. In nature, plants have evolved two important mechanisms to overcome the effects of drought stress: (1) drought avoidance, which enables plants to maintain relatively high tissue water content in water-limited environments by minimizing water loss and optimizing water uptake, and (2) drought tolerance, which enables plants to endure low tissue water content by maintaining cell turgor (resulting from osmotic adjustment and cellular elasticity) and increasing protoplasmic resistance (Basu et al., 2016). With more and more genomics resources available for diverse plant lineages showing contrasting strategies and variation in drought avoidance or tolerance (Yin et al., 2014; Abraham et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2018), systems biology, which features genome-scale analysis of molecules and their interactions (Westerhoff and Palsson, 2004), is becoming a popular approach to link genes to drought-avoidance or drought-tolerance traits. Our knowledge about the genes associated with drought stress responses generated by systems biology research can inform the construction of libraries of biological parts for synthetic biology, which aims to design or re-design biological processes (Cook et al., 2014). Synthetic biology has great potential for creating genetically-modified plants with enhanced drought avoidance or tolerance (Borland et al., 2014; De Paoli et al., 2014; Llorente et al., 2018). This Research Topic features three articles on the theme of systems biology of crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) as a model strategy for plant adaptation to water-limited conditions and four articles related to genetic improvement of plant drought avoidance or tolerance using synthetic biology and genetic engineering approaches.