(COURTHOUSE NEWS) – Increased temperatures and water scarcity due to climate change have raised fears of food shortages as droughts affect crop production worldwide. One way scientists have been looking to sustain crop yield is to develop more robust plants to withstand prolonged drought.
Although some have focused on genetic modification to accomplish this, researchers with Japan’s RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science have developed a simple, cost-effective ethanol soil treatment that could help crops thrive even throughout periods of drought. They published their findings Wednesday in the journal Plant and Cell Physiology.
“The discovery came from the process of searching for compounds that make plants resistant to stress,” said Motoaki Seki, co-author of the study and leader of RIKEN’s Plant Genomic Research Team, in an email interview. “In general, experiments on compounds use organic solvents such as ethanol, acetone and methanol to dissolve insoluble substances. Our experiment used several kinds of organic solvents and obtained data that made us suspect that the organic solvents, not the compounds, could have a property that makes plants stress resistant.”
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