Corn engineered to make a new sugar survives heat better
Dong Z, Li T, Li X, Li D, Shi X
Crop Improvement
As summers get hotter, the corn in fields you drive past could increasingly struggle to survive heat waves during critical growth stages, and this points to a possible way breeders could help it cope.
Corn can't naturally make a sugar called stachyose, but a small mustard-family plant called Arabidopsis can, and that sugar helps plants handle heat. Researchers took the gene for making stachyose from Arabidopsis and put it into corn, and the modified corn plants started producing the sugar and held up much better in high heat, with less leaf damage and fewer dead seedlings. They even showed that just spraying the sugar directly onto regular corn gave it some of the same heat protection.
Key Findings
Maize naturally lacks a functional STACHYOSE SYNTHASE (STS) gene and does not produce stachyose, unlike Arabidopsis which makes both raffinose and stachyose
Transgenic maize expressing Arabidopsis AtSTS accumulated stachyose and showed reduced leaf damage, higher seedling survival, and lower ion leakage under heat stress
Exogenous application of stachyose alone improved heat tolerance in wild-type maize, and AtSTS overexpression reduced reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists gave corn plants a gene borrowed from a small research plant, allowing corn to make a sugar it normally can't produce. The result: corn seedlings that survive heat waves better, with less leaf damage and cell injury.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Reconstruction of the raffinose family oligosaccharide pathway in maize improves heat stress tolerance.
Raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFOs), primarily raffinose and stachyose, are crucial for plant abiotic stress tolerance. Raffinose is synthesized by RAFFINOSE SYNTHASE (RAFS) from galactinol an...
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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 ...