Barley's branching hormone turns out to be a drought survival tool
Fontana IM, Buchcik W, Kumlehn J, Melzer M, Hensel G
Crispr
If you've ever watched a drought-stressed plant in your garden wilt faster than its neighbors, this points to a specific hormone pathway controlling how well crops cope with dry spells, and it's a pathway breeders could dial up to make grains tougher.
Barley plants make a hormone called strigolactone that controls how many side shoots (tillers) they grow. Researchers used gene editing to knock out different steps of this hormone's production in barley, then put the plants through a drought test. The plants missing this hormone branched out more but struggled badly without water, losing more biomass and water content than normal plants, revealing that this growth hormone doubles as a drought defense tool.
Key Findings
Three mutant types (Hvd10, Hvd17, Hvd14) showed the classic high-tillering, bushy phenotype of strigolactone deficiency, while a fourth (Hvmax1a) looked architecturally normal like wild-type plants.
Under drought, high-tillering SL mutants showed the most pronounced reductions in biomass, relative water content, and photosynthetic efficiency, along with elevated accumulation of ABA (abscisic acid) stress hormone metabolites.
Hvmax1a had normal plant architecture but a mutant-like stressed metabolic profile under drought, showing that hormone signaling and physical growth traits can be decoupled.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists created a collection of barley plants with disabled strigolactone hormone genes and found that losing this hormone makes plants bushier but much worse at handling drought, with weaker growth, less water retention, and stress hormone overload.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Generation and characterization of a barley strigolactone mutant collection: from plant architecture to drought stress response.
Strigolactones (SLs) are known to regulate shoot architecture and to be involved in plant responses to environmental stress, whereas their specific contributions to drought adaptation in barley rem...
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Barley, a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. One of the first cultivated grains, it was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BC, giving it nonshattering spikelets and making it much easier to harvest. Its use then spread throughou...