Today, climate change has ushered in a new era of drought – and this time there’s no end in sight.
If Joseph were alive today, he might very well pick up the phone and call Israeli startup PlantArcBio.
This time, it’s based on science, not dreams.
PlantArcBio’s big idea is that at least some of the genes found there can help other plants survive in low-water conditions.
But using computers to match gene to plant is expensive and time consuming, Shalitin tells ISRAEL21c.
Instead of relying on simulations, PlantArcBio collects actual soil and water samples from the Dead Sea area.
“We don’t have to know in advance what genes we have inside the sample,” Shalitin explains.
“The plants with the best genes showed an improvement of 10 to 15 percent” in dealing with drought conditions, Shalitin explains.
Soybeans are particularly important for PlantArcBio – and for the planet.
Needle in a haystack PlantArcBio, which was founded in 2014, has so far identified about 100 genes (out of a million tested) that help plants become more drought tolerant.

Tardigrades use unique protein to protect themselves from desiccation.
"In addition, the proteins that these genes encode can be used to protect other biological material — like bacteria, yeast, and certain enzymes — from desiccation."
But biochemical studies of tardigrades have found trehelose at low levels or not at all, and sequencing has not revealed the gene for the enzyme required to make this sugar.
The researchers identified genes that were upregulated and expressed at high levels when the animals began to dry out.
The proteins that these genes encode, the TDPs, are in a class of proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs).
After they found the TDP genes expressed at high levels during the drying-out period in one species of tardigrade, the team looked at two other species and found the same genes.
"We think it can do this because it has so many of these proteins around already and doesn’t need time to make them," Boothby says.
To verify that these TDPs were what gave tardigrades their unique abilities, the researchers put the genes encoding them into yeast and bacteria, and confirmed that the TDPs protected these other organisms.
Trehelose helps other organisms to survive drying out by forming glass-like solids when they dry, rather than crystals.
These real-world applications are one of the things that led me to study tardigrades."

Because plants cannot relocate when resources become scarce, they need to efficiently regulate their growth by responding to environmental cues.
Drought is the most important cause of reduced plant growth and crop yield, which makes insights into a plant’s drought response highly valuable to agriculture.
The findings are published in the leading academic journal The Plant Cell.
Scientists predict that climate change will cause widespread agricultural problems, mainly in the form of drought — especially when fresh water and irrigation infrastructure are not available.
Extreme food shortages could be the result, making it very important for scientists to find new ways to protect crop plants against drought on a genetic level.
But before they can do this, they need to understand more about which genes are responsible for the changes in a plant’s growth rate under drought conditions.
Large-scale study uses the latest genetic analysis technologies Before this study — the largest of its kind — conducted by a team led by Professor Dirk Inzé, scientists had little insight into the genes and genetic processes that drive some plants to limit their growth under drought conditions while others grow normally.
Core genes affected by drought stress identified At a molecular level, even though the diversity in the drought responses of the different accessions was huge, only a small number of genes was affected in virtually all 100 types of Arabidopsis.
These genes are the core of a plant’s drought defense response.
Prof Inzé (VIB-Ghent University): "This study provided major insights into how plants cope with water-limiting conditions, which can direct advanced breeding and genome engineering efforts to create high-performing, drought-tolerant crop plants.

New MutChromSeq technique makes valuable genes easier to find.
Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have applied an innovative technique to the analysis of wheat and barley genomes that makes it easier to pinpoint specific genes that might be used in crop improvement programmes.
Identifying the gene for an interesting trait that might help you breed better crops isn’t always easy — especially if you’re working with wheat or barley.
But scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have applied an innovative technique to the wheat and barley genomes that makes it easier to pinpoint specific genes that might be used in crop improvement programmes.
But locating the gene for a particular plant trait can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack — it’s a small, specific sequence of DNA mixed up in a jumble of other genes, regulatory sequences and non-coding DNA.
So how does MutChromSeq work?
"Take the bread wheat genome, for example: this has 21 chromosomes, so with flow sorting, we can separate Chromosome 1 from Chromosome 2, and from Chromosome 3, and so on.
Then, by running MutChromSeq analysis on these mutant plants, the sequence of the mutated chromosomes can be compared with that of the unmutated chromosome.
Dr Wulff said: "By looking for the differences in sequence between the mutated and wild-type chromosomes, we can identify genes without knowing anything about their structure beforehand.
Rapid gene isolation in barley and wheat by mutant chromosome sequencing.

How tequila could be key in our battle against climate change.
Agave — the cactus-like plant which forms the base ingredient of tequila — has a nocturnal ‘body clock’ which allows it to ‘breathe’ at night and withstand the driest of conditions, new research has shown.
Publishing their findings in this month’s Nature Plants, the team from Newcastle University, UK, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, reveal for the first time how the stomata — or ‘breathing’ pores — on the Agave’s leaves are kept shut during the day to minimise water loss.
Newcastle University’s Professor Anne Borland, one of the authors of the study, explains: "Photosynthesis needs three key ingredients — CO2, water and sunlight — so it follows that most plants keep their stomata open in the day when it is sunny and shut at night when it is dark.
"But for a plant living in hot, arid conditions such as the Agave, this would be disastrous.
They need to conserve every drop of water they can and leaving their stomata open during the day would result in such rapid water loss they would simply die.
"If we can harness these genes and engineer new drought-resistant plants then the potential is huge in terms of developing crops and biofuels that are able to withstand the challenges we face from a changing climate."
Sequencing thousands of genes and proteins to understand the underlying metabolic processes, the team compared the Agave — or CAM — plant with Arabidopsis, a type of cress and a typical C3 plant.
"This is a really exciting discovery and a major breakthrough in our quest to create new plants that can cope in our future environment."
The study is part of a $14m research programme funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science Genomic Science Programme.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, rice is the world’s third-largest crop after wheat and maize. It’s the staple food in large regions of the world, and with increasing demand and the perceived perils of a changing climate, the vulnerability of rice production to droughts is a growing concern. The RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) is developing new transgenic strains of rice incorporating a gene from the weed thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) to make them more drought-resistant. The CSRS scientists say that plants are able to adapt to drought by generating chemicals called osmoprotectants that include various forms of sugar. By increasing the concentration of the protectants in cells, they retain water better – much in the same way, to make a crude analogy, a damp salt cake dries out more slowly than a dish of water. Sick of Ads? More than 700 New Atlas Plus subscribers read our newsletter and website without ads….