Crops for dry environments

Climate change necessitates increased stress resilience of food crops. We describe four potential solutions, with emphasis on a relatively novel approach aiming at true tolerance of drought rather than improved water-holding capacity of crops, which is a common approach in current breeding and genome editing efforts. Some Angiosperms are known to tolerate loss of 95% of their cellular water, without dying, not dissimilar to seeds. The molecular mechanisms and their regulation underlying this remarkable ability are potentially useful to design tolerant crops. Since most crops produce desiccation tolerant seeds, genomic information for this attribute is present but inactive in vegetative parts of the plant. Based on recent evidence from both seeds and desiccation tolerant Angiosperms we address possible routes to `flipping the switch' to vegetative desiccation tolerance in major crops.

Automated summary

Climate change requires increased stress resilience of food crops. This article presents four potential solutions, with emphasis on a novel approach aiming at true drought tolerance rather than improved water-holding capacity of crops. Evidence from seeds and desiccation tolerant Angiosperms suggests the possibility of transforming the vegetative parts of major crops into desiccation-tolerant.