UC Riverside Study Reveals How Plants Pause Growth Under Stress
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- UC Riverside researchers identified a two-stage mechanism plants use to rapidly slow growth under environmental stress, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Katie Dehesh, UCR distinguished professor of molecular biochemistry, said plants respond by directly altering enzyme activity rather than gene expression, allowing immediate reaction without waiting for new proteins to be made.
- Reactive oxygen molecules interfere with key enzymes while new compounds accumulate and block upstream steps, creating a protective pause that redirects resources away from growth during prolonged stress.
- Previous crop-engineering efforts to boost yields, drought tolerance, and carotenoid production often failed because they did not account for this two-stage response, according to the Dehesh laboratory.
- Wilhelmina (Mien) van de Ven, a former lab manager and research supervisor, led the decade-long detective work and continued contributing to the project for two years after retiring, returning to the lab to complete key enzyme experiments.
Why it matters: Decades of crop-engineering attempts to boost yields, drought tolerance, and carotenoid output failed for a reason nobody isolated: the two-stage stress response that causes plants to throttle growth. Now that the enzyme-level feedback loop is mapped, scientists have a concrete lever for designing crops that pause growth only when truly needed — a practical edge as drought, heat, salinity, and intense light increasingly threaten farm output.
