Sheltering Plants for Drought Research

Basic rain-out shelters are designed to protect a plot of land whenever rain is predicted in the forecast but Donald Danforth Center scientists Drs. Tom Brutnell, Todd Mockler, Hector Quemada and Ivan Baxter, USDA Research Scientist, have teamed up with Dr. Andrew Leakey at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to utilize rain-out shelters to induce drought conditions in order to examine the plants’ responses to water deficiency. These studies will help identify mechanisms necessary to improve crop performance under drought stress.

The rain-out shelters were funded in part by the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable fuels at the Danforth Center and as part of a five year, $12.1 million grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), to develop a new model plant system,Setaria viridis, to advance bioenergy grasses as a sustainable source of renewable fuels. Collaborators on this grant include the University of Illinois along with Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Minnesota and Washington State University.

Drought is the number one stress that crops endure which limits yield and is of growing concern due to the globe’s diminishing water supply and climate change. Danforth Center researchers first examined the response of the model grass, Setaria viridis, to drought in 2012 with rain-out canopies over two plots in which the researchers induced drought conditions and subjected the plants to controlled irrigation. Drip or manual irrigation is a good way to assure proper separation between control and stress plot treatments.

“The rain-out shelters enable us to discover what genes are regulating drought response so we can achieve bioenergy grasses with increased water use efficiency,” said Sankalpi Warnasooriya, postdoctoral associate in Dr. Tom Brutnell’s lab, director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Danforth Center

Farmers now have to plant crops closer together due to limited arable land area. The high density planting causes crops to use more resources to project out from canopy shade to obtain sunlight for photosynthesis. The increase in planting density in return can cause reduction in grain yield.

Domestication of corn over the years has favored dense plantings and currently, corn is planted at about 38,000 plants per acre for efficient use of limited arable land. This past May, the density of two plots of grasses were reviewed and studied.  These field experiments were designed to test how the recombinant inbred lines generated from Setaria, respond to low and high density planting. Such field experiments help researchers discover genes that can be potentially engineered to allow dense plantings of bioenegery grasses.

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