Moving Toward Crops With Drought Tolerance

A collaborative team of scientists has made a significant advance on the discovery last year by the University of California, Riverside’s Sean Cutler of pyrabactin, a synthetic chemical that mimics a naturally produced stress hormone in plants to help them cope with drought conditions.

Led by researchers at The Medical College of Wisconsin, the scientists report in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology on Aug. 22 that by understanding how pyrabactin works, other more effective chemicals for bringing drought-resistance to plants can be developed more readily.

Click here for the full report from the University of California-Riverside.