Chloroplast Engineering of Drought Tolerance

Through plastid genome engineering, we have achieved agronomic transformation of many important crops, such as herbicide resistance, drought tolerance, salt tolerance, insect resistance, pathogen resistance, nitrogen fixation, nutrition, and cytoplasmic male sterility. Here, Lifeasible is committed to providing crops with reliable and economical chloroplast genetic engineering solutions to develop crops with enhanced drought resistance.

Introduction

Drought is one of the environmental pressures that affects the productivity of most field crops and poses a major threat to food security. Therefore, humans must develop agricultural strategies to deal with water scarcity, grow plants in short climatic intervals when water resources are available, and select plants that are relatively tolerant of water scarcity. Plants utilize a variety of strategies to cope with drought stress and adapt to drought through diverse signaling cascades and osmotically regulated morphological and physiological changes. New crop varieties with higher drought resistance have been developed by conventional breeding methods. Chloroplasts are specialized photosynthetic organelles that are vulnerable to damage by many environmental stresses, and scientists have successfully genetically engineered crop chloroplasts to respond to drought stress.

Fig. 1. Drought tolerance genes that have been discovered or tested in model species and translated successfully into crop species. (Martignago D, et al., 2020)

Our Solutions

Plant genetic engineering provides the possibility to control the plant genome towards more specific and grand goals, study gene structure and function, and determine the relationship between gene expression and causal factors. Our engineers use biotechnology to improve the most promising phenotypic drought trait for drought resistance in rice. In addition, we identify and manipulate novel genes that may confer drought resistance through current genome editing technologies. Here, we currently offer the following solutions to impart drought resistance to crops.

(1) Early Flowering and Drought Escape Mediated Drought Response

We overexpressed the OsFTL10 gene in transgenic rice plants, resulting in earlier flowering and improved drought tolerance.

(2) Leaf Traits Mediated Drought Response

We improved the photosynthetic activity and drought performance of dicots by manipulating ethylene biosynthesis genes such as HaHB4.

(3) Stomatal Mediated Drought Response

We overexpressed the AtNF-YB1 gene and the ABA receptor pyrabactin resistance 1-like 1 (pyl1), pyl4 and pyl6 in transgenic crops to improve drought tolerance.

(4) Carbon Allocation Mediated Drought Response

We overexpressed OsNACs, OsERF71, HVA1, and DRO1 genes in transgenic crops to improve drought and high salt resistance by expanding root diameter.

Attractive Advantages of Our Solutions

• We have identified hundreds of genes that control key processes in drought response or adaptation.
• A variety of drought resistance genes are used to support our solution, such as FTA/FTB genes, SNAC1, OsNAC9, OsNAC10 and OsLEA3-1, ZmNF-YB2.
• Combines genetics, genomics, physiology, systems biology and agronomy with a solid professional foundation.
• It can help you identify missing signaling components in current models of drought response pathways, as well as crosstalk between different stress response pathways.
• Quickly find key functional units of crop drought resistance engineering.

Lifeasible's goal is to provide customers around the world with fully customized chloroplast engineered solutions for drought tolerance. Please contact us to discuss further details to ensure your next success.

References

1. Martignago D, Rico-Medina A, Blasco-Escámez D, et al. (2020) Drought resistance by engineering plant tissue-specific responses[J]. Frontiers in plant science.10: 1676.
2. Hu H, Xiong L. (2014) Genetic engineering and breeding of drought-resistant crops[J]. Annual review of plant biology. 65: 715-741.