ARTICLE: Circadian clock discovery could help boost water efficiency in food plants

The following is an excerpt of a press release posted to the Texas A&M AgriLife website announcing the results of a new study that could help water efficiency in plants. 

A discovery by Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists in Dallasprovides new insights about the biological or circadian clock, how it regulates high water-use efficiency in some plants, and how others, including food plants, might be improved for the same efficiency, possibly to grow in conditions uninhabitable for them today.

The scientists in their study, published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution at http://bit.ly/2xOZr1M, identify 1,398 transcription factors, proteins that regulate expression of certain genes in pineapple. Of those, nearly half exhibited time-of-day specific or diurnal gene expression patterns, which could be important in uncovering the genetic controls for water use in plants.

“This is an important step in understanding the overall circadian regulation of water-efficient photosynthesis and how that efficiency might be replicated in other plants, namely food crops,” said Dr. Qingyi Yu, AgriLife Research associate professor of plant genomics in Dallas.

Her team’s study comes on the heels of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded this year for discoveries related to the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythm.

Yu’s group focused on pineapple, a water-efficient tropical plant that uses crassulacean acid metabolism or CAM photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, CAM plants open their stomata at night to facilitate water-efficient gas exchange compared to C3 plants, whose less water-efficient gas exchange occurs during the day. The majority of food crops, including rice, wheat, soybean and cotton, use C3 photosynthesis.

To learn more about this research, please visit the Texas A&M AgriLife website.