Strategically dosing seeds with ethylene—a growth hormone often used to artificially ripen fruit—boosts their size, strength, and resilience to stress, finds a study that could help safeguard future crops against climate change.
Farmers are on a constant mission to boost the growth and yield of their crops. But in one of nature’s trade-offs, higher-yielding plants tend to be less resistant to stress. To get around this impasse, researchers have experimented with the highly promising ethylene, which plays a dual regulatory role in both plant growth and stress responses.
But despite its known benefits, when previous researchers have applied ethylene artificially to seeds in the past, the dosing protocol has resulted in warped and stunted plants—quite the opposite of what ethylene accomplishes naturally. Most of these studies have applied ethylene continuously to the seeds and under light conditions, explains Brad Binder, professor of biochemistry & cellular and molecular biology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and corresponding author on the new PNAS Nexus research.
In the new study, Binder and his team sought to fine-tune this process, and it seems they’ve identified a sweet spot: by dosing seeds with ethylene in conditions of darkness but then crucially tapering it off when the seedlings were exposed to light.
This more tailored approach made a remarkable difference. In fact, in experiments where the researchers pre-treated seeds of Arabidopsis (thale cress), tomato, cucumber, and wheat and then exposed the seedlings to light while tapering off ethylene, plants grew to have more abundant and lengthier roots, as well as being weightier and taller overall. In particular, tomato plants went on to grow taller and produce more leaves; cucumber seedling leaves grew much faster, and wheat seedlings showed more rapid root growth than controls.
Read more at anthropocenemagazine.org
