A cis-regulatory variant in ZmABI45 modulates drought tolerance and adaptation by escaping ZmbHLH80 repression in maize.
Liu X, Hu Y, Xie S, Tao K, Zhao Y
Climate Adaptation
The corn on your dinner plate could become harder to grow and more expensive as droughts intensify — but this natural gene variant, already quietly favored by generations of farmers in dry regions, gives breeders a proven tool to keep yields stable without genetic engineering.
Corn is extremely vulnerable to drought during the brief window when its pollen needs to meet the silks — a delay of even a few days can wipe out an entire crop. Researchers found that some corn plants carry a tiny natural change in the 'on switch' of a stress-response gene, which keeps that gene active during dry spells and helps pollen and silks stay in sync. Plants with this variant produced more grain under drought, and farmers in dry climates have been unknowingly selecting for it for decades.
Key Findings
A 12-base-pair deletion in the ZmABI45 gene promoter prevents the repressor protein ZmbHLH80 from silencing it, enabling drought-stress responses to activate more readily.
Maize plants engineered to overexpress ZmABI45 showed significantly shorter anthesis-silking intervals and improved grain yield under drought conditions.
Evolutionary analysis confirmed the drought-tolerant deletion variant has been positively selected during modern maize breeding and is geographically concentrated in low-rainfall regions.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists identified a natural genetic variant in maize that controls how well corn plants survive drought during flowering — the make-or-break window for grain production. A tiny DNA deletion in a gene's control switch keeps a drought-response gene active, shortening the gap between male and female flowering and preserving yield under water stress.
Abstract Preview
Drought stress during flowering severely threatens maize productivity by disrupting the synchrony of male and female flowering, while its genetic basis remains poorly understood. Through a genome-w...
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Maize, also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. The leafy stalk of the plant gives rise to male inflorescences or tassels which produce pollen, and female inflorescences called ears. The ears yield grain, known as kernels or seeds. In modern ...