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Twist the root epidermal cells of the root
away from saline ground.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen helped find this possible cause
.
The discovery has changed our understanding of how plants change their shape and growth direction, and may help alleviate the growing problem
of high soil salinity in farmland worldwide.
While a bath in the ultra-salty Dead Sea may be a comfort to one's soul and body, most plants have the exact opposite relationship to salt
.
Plants do their best to avoid salt – because salt can damage or even suffocate them
.
Unfortunately, salinity in agricultural land is an accelerating global problem, partly due to climate change, which increases the salinity of soils whenever floods sweep through coastal areas
.
This often reduces crop yields
.
"The world needs crops that are more tolerant to
salt.
Professor Staffan Persson, from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, explains: "If we are to develop more salt-tolerant plants, we must first understand how they react to salt
.
To avoid salt in the soil, plants can keep their roots away from saline ground
.
This is a vital mechanism
.
So far, it is not clear how they did it
.
”
Together with a group of foreign research colleagues, Persson discovered exactly what
happens at the cellular and molecular level when plant roots are moved away from salt.
The team found that when plants sense local salt concentrations, the stress hormone ABA (abscisic acid) is activated
.
This hormone initiates a response mechanism
.
"This plant has a stress hormone
triggered by salt.
This hormone causes the reorganization of tiny protein tubes in cells called the cytoskeleton
.
This reorganization causes similar reorganization of cellulose fibers around the root cell, forcing the root to twist and grow in a way that moves away from salt," explains
Professor Persson.
The dominant role played by stress hormones surprised the researchers with this
finding.
Until now, it was thought that auxin hormone controlled the ability of plants to change direction (known as tropism)
under various environmental influences.
"This is a completely new discovery
that the stress hormone ABA is essential for plants to reorganize cell walls and change the shape and direction of growth.
This will open up new avenues for plant research, and there will be more attention to the important role hormones play in the ability of plants to respond to various conditions by changing their movements," said
Staffan Persson.
By mutating one amino acid in a protein that drives the twisting of the root, the researchers were able to reverse that distortion so that the plant could not grow
away from salt.
Persson believes it will take some time for the new knowledge to be applied to agriculture – not least since GMOs are still banned in the EU
.
However, this result may open the way
for the development of more varieties of salt-tolerant crops.
"When plants feel salt, they produce more stress hormones
.
It's not hard to imagine that if you could speed up the plant's response to stress by altering other aspects of the cytoskeleton, you might be able to make its root twist happen faster
.
In this way, we can enhance the nutrition of plants by reducing their exposure to salt," says
Professor Persson.
Root twisting drives halotropism via stress-induced microtubule reorientation
