![]() Eventually, the researchers developed a mutant of corn that lacked the ability to engage the final stage of that recycling. Each time, the corn responded the same way.īut the team had reason to suspect that the tolerance also relied on autophagy - what Schnable called “a recycling program” in plant cells that takes apart old or damaged proteins, then reassembles them into fresh, functioning ones. The results were so startling to Sun that he soon repeated the experiment multiple times. Within days, he noticed the crop growing more - regardless of whether it was nutrient-deprived. The plan worked: Curbing the enzyme cranked up the trehalose levels in the corn. He turned to an antibiotic that can inhibit the enzyme responsible for degrading trehalose. “If I cannot supply trehalose to the plants, what if I stopped its degradation in those plants?” “So I thought about it in the opposite way,” said Sun, who now works as a bioinformatician at the Mayo Clinic. What if, they thought, we could increase trehalose in corn, then observe the results? But applying trehalose directly to the crop proved ineffective. While the finding suggested that trehalose was playing a central role in the plant’s resilience, Sun and the team pressed on for evidence that could meet a higher burden of proof. Though corn and sorghum naturally churn out some of that molecule, the team saw no change in its production among the two nutrient-starved crops. Those strides cleared the way to studying seashore paspalum’s tolerance in greater detail.Īnalyses of its genes and gene expression later revealed that the grass responds to a lack of nutrients by roughly doubling its production of a sugary molecule called trehalose. ![]() The seashore paspalum, meanwhile, continued “happily growing.”įortunately, the Schnable lab was also working with the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, the University of Georgia and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology on mapping the species’ genome. When the corn and sorghum were denied nitrogen or phosphorous, their stunted development betrayed it. He decided to put seashore paspalum’s resilience to the test with an experiment, growing it alongside corn and sorghum for several weeks under multiple conditions. Guangchao Sun, a doctoral alumnus and former postdoc at Nebraska, took notice, too. In fact, it usually grows so fast that it’ll try to invade the pots of neighboring plants, and the greenhouse manager has to yell at me or folks in my lab to come down and trim it.” ![]() ![]() “There was a period where no one remembered to water the paspalum plant for a couple of months,” Schnable said. The species really began intriguing Schnable and his colleagues after an especially impressive display of its resilience. Gardner Professor of Agronomy at Nebraska. “We finally are starting to understand just what makes this plant so resilient,” said James Schnable, one of the study’s authors and Charles O. What’s more, the researchers managed to recreate those tricks in corn seedlings, which responded by growing faster and larger than other, unmodified seedlings deprived of the nutrients. That sets it apart from some of its surprisingly close relatives: corn and sorghum, among other grass crops.Īfter sequencing the full genetic blueprints of the hardy grass, a multi-institution research team has discovered the bag of tricks behind the plant’s fasting technique. As it turns out, seashore paspalum doesn’t need much of those nutrients, either. Global application of fertilizers, especially the nitrogen and phosphorous essential to plant growth, has skyrocketed since the mid-20th century, around the time a teenage Pelé was leading Brazil to its first World Cup title. Thanks to a new study led by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, seashore paspalum may soon assist another goal: growing crops that yield more food with less of the fertilizer that imposes costs on farmers, ecosystems and drinking water. There, it’s withstood every steel-cleated footfall of Messi, Mbappé and Neymar, every sunbeaten day of temperatures creeping into the high 80s Fahrenheit. How about 22 soccer players sprinting, kicking and sliding their way across it at the 2022 World Cup, all amid the desert climate of the Middle East? Game on.Ī commercial variety of seashore paspalum has padded every pitch in Qatar. But Paspalum vaginatum, a species better known as seashore paspalum, can tolerate stresses diverse and deadly enough to rival camels and cactuses.
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