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UCLA research makes possible rapid assessment of plant drought tolerance
Date:7/31/2012

growth depends on the ability to withstand enormous losses of water to evaporation when they open their pores, or stomata, to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. The amount of evaporation a plant can tolerate depends on the water pressure inside of its cells, which in turn depends on its turgor potential; the pushing force of water against the inside of the cell walls; and the osmotic potential inside the cell, which is to say, the pulling force of dissolved salt molecules on the water molecules the same force that makes water with salt added boil at a higher temperature.

Plant cells need to maintain their turgor pressure to hold up their cell walls, but as evaporation dries out the cells, they lose turgor pressure, said co-author Christine Scoffoni, a UCLA graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

At the turgor loss point, saltier cells have a stronger pulling force holding the water molecules inside the cell. Plants with saltier cells can keep their stomata open in drier conditions, Sack said.

The turgor loss point, which varies widely among species, is a powerful determinant of the plant's drought tolerance. The UCLA team previously showed that the turgor loss point can predict the dryness of the ecosystem from which a plant species comes.

"Drought-tolerant plants typically have low turgor loss points and saltier sap," said lead author Megan Bartlett, a UCLA graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Some plant species even load more salt into their cells when they experience a drought to lower their turgor loss point and improve their drought tolerance."

Researchers have been measuring turgor loss point and osmotic potential, or cell saltiness, for decades. Once the UCLA team demonstrated that these are the key traits to predict drought tolerance, they realized that a stumbling block to their use is the difficulty of their measurement. Thes
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Contact: Stuart Wolpert
swolpert@support.ucla.edu
310-206-0511
University of California - Los Angeles
Source:Eurekalert

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