Understanding Drought Stress in Cereal Crops

Understanding Drought Stress in Cereal Crops

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Feeding the world in the midst of a volatile climate has agricultural researchers focused on better understanding how to grow more drought-tolerant crops.

Jeff Dahlberg is the Director at the University of California Ag and Natural Resources Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. He and his team are analyzing how the sorghum plant responds to varying levels of drought stress.

Dahlberg…”We've, we've always known that drought is not an easy thing to really understand. And, we saw that in this case as well. There's lots of genes that get turned on and off. Depending on what kind of response we're seeing in either pre- or post-flowering drought stress.

It seems that the roots are much more sensitive to that as well. So we were seeing lots of genes being turned off when the drought was trying to impact the roots. But that also had an impact on some of these microbial communities that we were looking at as well. So there seems to be some interaction between the genes and how the roots were responding to how these communities were responding as well. It's just incredible the amount of information that we have and also how little we understand how these plants are really interacting.”

Dahlberg hopes these findings in sorghum will lead to a better understanding of drought tolerance in all cereal grains.

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