Fungi Can Help Rice to Adapt to Climate Change

Rice could be adapted to climate change and other environmental events by colonizing its seeds with the spores of fungi that exist naturally within native coastal (salt-tolerant) and geothermal (heat-tolerant) plants. This was revealed in an article Increased Fitness of Rice Plants to Abiotic Stress via Habitat Adapted Symbiosis: A Strategy for Mitigating Impacts of Climate Change, published in the journal PLoS One.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey of the Department of the Interior led by Rusty Rodriquez revealed that experiments have proven successful. "This is an exciting breakthrough," Rodriguez said. "The ability of these fungi to colonize and confer stress tolerance, as well as increased seed yields and root systems in rice – a genetically unrelated plant species from the native plants from which the fungi were isolated -- suggests that the fungi may be useful in adapting plants to drought, salt and temperature stressors predicted to worsen in future years due to climate change."

The fungi called endophytes has potential for mitigating the effects of climate change on plants in natural and agricultural ecosystems. The researchers have named this emerging area of research "symbiogenics" for symbiosis-altered gene expression.

See the media release at http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2852&from=rss_home