Biology
Abiotic stress causes major crop losses and is considered a greater challenge than
biotic stress. Comparisons of the number of published articles and patents regarding
these different types of stresses, and the number of commercially released crops
designed to tolerate different types of stresses, revealed a huge gap in the benchto-
field transfer rate of abiotic stress-tolerant crops, as compared to crops designed
to tolerate biotic stress. These differences underscore the complexity of abiotic
stress-response mechanisms. Here, we suggest that breeding programs favoring yieldrelated
quantitative physiological traits (QPTs; e.g., photosynthesis rate or stomatal
conductance) have canalized those QPTs at their highest levels. This has affected the
sensitivity of those QPTs to changing environmental conditions and those traits have
become less plastic. We also suggest that breeding pressure has had an asymmetric
impact on different QPTs, depending on their sensitivity to environmental conditions
and their interactions with other QPTs. We demonstrate this asymmetric impact on the
regulation of whole-plant water balance, showing how plastic membrane water content,
stomatal conductance and leaf hydraulic conductance interact to canalize whole-organ
water content. We suggest that a QPT’s plasticity is itself an important trait and that
understanding this plasticity may help us to develop yield-optimized crops.“Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, The Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel”Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2017.02067/full
Courtesy: https://www.frontiersin.org
Copyright: published: 05 December 2017 doi: 10.3389/fpls.2017.02067.