Seeds that would otherwise lie dormant will spring to life with the aid of a new chemical discovered by a UC Riverside-led team.
Seeds that would otherwise lie dormant will spring to life with the aid of a new chemical discovered by a UC Riverside-led team.
Plants have the ability to perceive drought. When they do, they emit a hormone that helps them hold on to water. This same hormone, ABA, sends a message to seeds that it isn’t a good time to germinate, leading to lower crop yields and less food in places where it’s hot — an increasingly long list as a result of climate change.
“If you block ABA, you mess with the chemical pathway that plants use to prevent seed germination,” said Aditya Vaidya, UCR project scientist and study author. “Our new chemical, Antabactin, does exactly this. If we apply it, we have shown that dormant seeds will sprout.”
Demonstrations of Antabactin’s effectiveness are described in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read more at University of California - Riverside
Photo Credit: Mayur_Ankushe via Pixabay
