All DRII-ed up: How do crops get better after drought?

August 29, 2025

All DRII-ed up: How do crops get better after drought?

Salk Institute researchers discover crops quickly enhance their immune methods throughout drought restoration, pinpointing potential genetic methods for designing extra drought-resistant crops

August 29, 2025

LA JOLLA—A plant’s primary precedence is to develop—a feat that calls for daylight, vitamins, and water. If simply one among these three inputs is lacking, like water in a drought, progress halts. You may then suppose that on the finish of that drought, the plant would soar proper again into rising. Instead, its priorities shift.

Salk plant biologists used superior single-cell and spatial transcriptomic strategies to look intently at how a small, flowering plant known as Arabidopsis thaliana recovers after drought. They found that immunity grew to become the plant’s primary precedence throughout this post-drought interval, as they watched immune-boosting genes gentle up quickly all through the Arabidopsis leaves. This supercharged immune response, dubbed “Drought Recovery-Induced Immunity” (DRII), additionally occurred in wild and domesticated tomatoes, suggesting that prioritizing immunity is conserved evolutionarily and certain takes place in different necessary crops.

The findings, printed in Nature Communications on August 29, 2025, plant the seed for rising extra resilient crops and defending the worldwide meals provide in years to come back.

“Drought poses a major challenge for plants, but what is less understood is how they recover once water returns,” says senior creator Joseph Ecker, professor, Salk International Council Chair in Genetics, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “We found that, rather than accelerating growth to compensate for lost time, Arabidopsis rapidly activates a coordinated immune response. This discovery highlights recovery as a critical window of genetic reprogramming and points to new strategies for engineering crops that can rebound more effectively after environmental stress.”

Thirsty plant, dry soil

Arabidopsis has served as an necessary laboratory mannequin for plant biologists for half a century. The plant is fast and straightforward to develop, and it has a comparatively easy genome in comparison with different crops. But crucially, most of the particular person genes throughout the Arabidopsis genome are shared throughout many plant species—together with agriculturally related crops like tomatoes, wheat, and rice.

One characteristic Arabidopsis shares with each plant is its want for water. The little plant sucks up water by means of microscopic pores on its “skin”—however these little pores may put the plant in danger, as they immediately expose its weak insides to the surface world. This challenges the plant to discover a stability between taking in water and defending itself in opposition to dangerous environmental intruders like pathogens.

This stability turns into even extra difficult throughout drought restoration. Without water, the plant closes its pores and enters a pressured state, arresting its progress and rationing its shops. When water returns, the pores shortly reopen to quench the thirsty plant, exposing it instantly as soon as extra to the hazards of the surface world. So, how do crops shield themselves from this sudden onslaught within the drought restoration course of?

“We know a lot about what’s happening in plants during drought, yet we know next to nothing about what happens during that critical recovery period,” says first creator Natanella Illouz-Eliaz, a postdoctoral researcher in Ecker’s lab. “This recovery period is incredibly genetically active and complex, as we’ve already discovered processes we had no idea—or even assumed—would be a part of recovery. Now we know definitively that recovery is worth studying more moving forward.”

A speedy, single-cell, spatially conscious research

The researchers took Arabidopsis crops that had been residing in a drought state and reintroduced the parched crops to water. They surveyed the crops’ leaves for adjustments in gene expression beginning at quarter-hour and incrementally labored all the way in which as much as 260 minutes. This speedy surveillance units the research aside, as plant biologists typically don’t seize information so quickly after rehydration.

“What’s really incredible here,” provides Illouz-Eliaz, “is we would have entirely missed this discovery had we not decided to capture data at these early time points.”

While all of the cells in an Arabidopsis leaf share the identical genetic code, the expression of every gene in that code varies from cell to cell. The sample of genes expressed by every distinctive cell determines that cell’s id and performance. Effectively capturing gene expression patterns that differ between microscopic cells means recruiting refined gene-sequencing expertise like single-cell and spatial transcriptomics.

Older strategies required scientists to take a leaf, grind it up, and measure common expression patterns from there. Single-cell transcriptomics permits scientists to seize gene expression inside a mobile context, which in flip extra precisely represents mobile dynamics inside plant tissues. In addition to this spectacular single-cell precision, spatial transcriptomics analyzes these single cells throughout the bodily context of the intact plant. With this methodology, scientists can course of the leaf (or a piece of that leaf) as a complete to see how expression differs between neighboring cells all through drought or restoration.

Drought Recovery-Induced Immunity (DRII)

Just quarter-hour after rewatering, the workforce watched dormant genes sprout to life. Expression patterns shifted considerably throughout the various leaf cells, turning on gene after gene till 1000’s of latest genes have been energetic. These many genes kick-started an immune response that the researchers name “Drought Recovery-Induced Immunity” (DRII). In the weak rehydration interval, DRII got here to Arabidopsis’ protection, defending the plant in opposition to pathogens.

After witnessing DRII in Arabidopsis, the workforce was curious whether or not wild and farmed tomato crops expertise DRII, too. Both tomato sorts did expertise DRII, which, like in Arabidopsis, elevated their pathogen resistance. These tomato findings additionally recommend the immune response could also be shared throughout many different plant and crop species.

There’s extra left to grasp about this speedy immune response. For starters, the rehydration course of begins within the roots, so how does the sign journey so shortly from the roots to the leaf, enacting gene expression adjustments in solely quarter-hour? And what’s that sign?

The researchers additionally consider the findings may help shift the sphere’s perspective on plant stress. Perhaps crops aren’t simply specializing in survival and progress, however relatively on making ready for what comes subsequent after water returns. And possibly weighing survival versus longevity is determined by a system that senses stress severity.

“Our results reveal that drought recovery is not a passive process but a highly dynamic reprogramming of the plant’s immune system,” says Ecker. “By defining the early genetic events that occur within minutes of rehydration, we can begin to uncover the molecular signals that coordinate stress recovery and explore how these mechanisms might be harnessed to improve crop resilience.”

Other authors embody Jingting Yu, Joseph Swift, Kathryn Lande, Bruce Jow, Lia Partida-Garcia, Travis Lee, Rosa Gomez Castanon, William Owens, Chynna Bowman, Emma Osgood, Joseph Nery, and Tatsuya Nobori of Salk; and Za Khai Tuang, Adi Yaaran, Yotam Zait, and Saul Burdman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The work was supported by the United States–Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (FI-601-2020), George E. Hewitt Foundation for Medical Research, Weizmann Institute of Science, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, National Institutes of Health (K99GM154136, NCI CSSG P30 CA014195, NIA P30 AG068635), Henry L. Guenther Foundation, and Waitt Foundation.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63467-2