Giving drought the cold shoulder: A relationship between drought tolerance and fall dormancy in an agriculturally important crop

Fall dormant/freezing tolerant plants often also exhibit superior tolerance to drought conditions compared to their non-fall dormant/freezing intolerant counterparts.   In a recent article published in AoB PLANTS, Pembleton and Sathish report the results of an experiment aimed to investigate this phenomenon in an agriculturally important crop.  Seven alfalfa cultivars with varying levels of fall dormancy/freezing tolerance were exposed to a water deficit.  The more fall dormant cultivars had superior tolerance to a mild water deficit.  Two genes, CAS18 (encodes for a dehydrin like protein) and CorF (encodes for a galactinol synthase), were upregulated in association with this drought tolerance.  Both these genes are early response genes, providing clues to the stress signalling pathways involved.