Plant roots hide a second identity — and drought flips the switch

A root cannot run from a drought, so it improvises. Researchers at the University of Western Australia, led by Dr Marina Oliva and Professor Ryan Lister, read the gene activity of hundreds of thousands of individual root cells in the model plant Arabidopsis — and found that almost every cell type secretly splits in two: some cells switch on a shared set of genes for responding to the environment, and some do not. When water ran short, the share of cells in 'response mode' climbed from about 4 in 10 to 2 in 3, steered by the drought hormone abscisic acid. 'One way roots do this is by shifting the balance between the two states their cells can adopt, almost like turning a dial,' says Lister. The work, published in Nature, points toward crops that cope better with dry years.

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