Plants Genetically Altered to Require Less Water
Published Jul 09, 2008
A worker helps set up an irrigation system in an artichoke field in Santa Cruz County. Water is a precious commodity statewide.
When Dr. Eduardo Blumwald arrived in California seven years ago, it didn’t take him long to learn about one of the key challenges confronting the state.
“California doesn’t have (a lot of) water. We buy it from elsewhere, and it is expensive,” says Blumwald, professor of cell biology in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Blumwald and a team of international researchers began studying how crops could grow while receiving less water. The research team also worked to develop agricultural crops in California that can sustain periods of drought.
As a result, the researchers ultimately inserted a gene into tobacco plants that interrupted the biochemical chain of events that lead to a plant’s loss of leaves during a drought. Leaves provide the nutrients that enable a plant to grow.
“We had genetically modified tobacco plants in a greenhouse that weren’t watered for 15 days, then we watered them and they continued to grow,” Blumwald says. “In fact, they eventually grew to full maturation using 30 percent less water than tobacco plants normally use. It was a great discovery.”
He says the discovery is especially important for California because some scientists believe the western United States may receive less frequent precipitation as one consequence of global warming.
“The amount of precipitation in California might not change, but the rains might come too much at one time, or they will be too concentrated in particular months – not spread out as farmers would want,” he says. “That’s why we started working on the drought issue.”
Blumwald says crops such as beans, tomatoes, rice, cotton and wheat theoretically could absorb the gene.
“We are not rainmakers, and we don’t make miracles,” he says. “This research merely tries to provide the plants with an advantage to sustain them for some time in drought conditions.”
Story by Kevin Litwin
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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