The promise of resurrection plants in enhancing crop tolerance to water scarcity

Climate change affects the agricultural sector by modifying precipitation patterns, increasing extreme weather events, and geographically shifting agriculturally viable areas. These climate alterations substantially impact plant resilience to abiotic stress and, consequently, agricultural productivity. A better understanding of plant adaptations to tolerate extreme environmental conditions could pave the way for future advances in agricultural sustainability. One such adaptation is vegetative desiccation tolerance (VDT), which enables some species, known as ‘resurrection plants’, to undergo almost complete drying without losing viability. The current review discusses how incorporating different molecular and biochemical mechanisms underlying VDT into crops might expand the time during which crops can continue growing under limiting water conditions and perhaps broaden the range of survivable negative water potentials that a crop can endure under drought stress. Such possibilities could alleviate the detrimental consequences of low water availability to crops. Understanding how plants survive extreme dehydration has the potential to enlighten new strategies to improve the climate resiliency of crops, thereby positively impacting worldwide food security and sustainability.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?’.

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