Related Links

Desiccation Tolerance:

 

Drought tolerance:

Glycinebetaine: a solution for cotton production in drought-prone areas?

 

Craterostigma plantagineum:

German researcher Dorothea Bartels work on the molecular basis of plant desiccation tolerance
another Dr. Bartels site

 

Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research

carries out research on the desert environment, required for promoting sustainable uses of the Negev Desert and other drylands the world over

 

Towards an Understanding of Desiccation Tolerance in Plants:

Brief description of work done by five reserarchers from Cape Town University. Botanist: Jill Farrant

Other:

Deep Gene

Deep Gene is an NSF funded research project geared towards the integration of plant phyogenetics and plant genomics.

Deep Green

A five-year effort to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among all green plants has resulted in the most complete "tree of life" of any group of living things on the planet, including animals.

 

 

Placement of Tr288 on an unrooted "Deep Green" phylogenetic network.*

Tr288 is a rehydrin gene isolated from Tortula ruralis, by conventional molecular technologies (Scott and Oliver, 1994, Velten and Oliver 2001), that encodes a LEA like protein that we postulate is important in the recovery of the moss from desiccation. The 288 protein is characterized by a series of repeated structural motifs anchored by a highly conserved 15 amino acid core peptide at the C-terminus of each segment. We used the highly repetitive nature of Tr288 to track the presence of Tr288 homologs in other species, through a PCR-based strategy. Those species that are considered desiccation-tolerant are in red, those that are moderately tolerant are in blue. The data are still preliminary but such an analysis illustrates the importance of taking a phylogenetic approach to desiccation tolerance.