Research Team Lays Foundation for Crops with Resistance to Combined Climatic Stresses

A study conducted by a research team at the Ecophysiology and Biotechnology of the Jaume I University of Castelló (UJI) lays the foundations for obtaining crops that are more resistant to combined climatic stresses. The research team led by Professor Aurelio Gómez Cadenas has found the essential mechanisms to obtain plants of agronomic interest with enhanced capacity to deal with environmental variables linked to climate change such as temperature increases, higher solar irradiation, drought, floods, and even pollution.

The team reviewed recent data on physiological, hormonal, and transcriptional responses to different stress combinations, and highlighted the importance of photodamage avoidance, abscisic and jasmonic acid signaling, and the upregulation of genes involved in oxidation–reduction processes, photosynthesis, and protein metabolism, for plant acclimation to high temperatures, in combination with other common abiotic stress factors such as drought or salinity. They propose new approaches to investigate the response of plants to stress combinations and discuss strategies for improving crop resilience to stress combination.

For more details, read the article in RUVID.