Crops drought resistance, is there such a thing?

Breeding programs have led to significant increases in crop yields, but these new, high-yielding cultivars often require increased amounts of water and are susceptible to drought and other forms of environmental stress. In recent years, a great deal of resources have been invested in trying to make these plants less susceptible to environmental stress, so that they can be grown in even more challenging areas. But, so far, these efforts yield moderate success.

In my talk, I will describe key mechanisms involved in plant water-balance management as well as the principal trade-offs between crop productivity and survivability mechanisms. I will elaborate on the differences between a "conservative" mechanism that improves the likelihood of plant survival, as well as “riskier” mechanisms that enhance rapid growth under optimal conditions, but may leave the plant particularly vulnerable to stress conditions.

I will describe the principles of high-throughput functional (physiological) phenotyping system designed to characterize many of the early components of a plant’s response to biotic and abiotic stress. Use of this experimental platform for the comparative physiological characterization of several crop cultivars, as well as WT populations, has revealed the existence of several plant stress-response strategies that we have classified according to their relative “conservative” (isohydric-like) or “risk-taking” (anisohydric-like) character. I will demonstrate the risk-management strategies of crop plants and discuss a case study of a “calculated risk-taking” trait that can be used as a marker for the selection of abiotic stress tolerance and resilient crop plants.