Description
Abiotic drought and salinity stress can cause severe crop losses and climate change is projected to increase their prevalence in future decades. Plants which are able to grow in hard environmental conditions are of interest to understand plant stress response mechanisms; especially given the limitations of Arabidopsis thaliana (Ath), which is mostly described as stress sensitive. The evolutionary proximity of extremophile Ath relatives like Arabidopsis lyrata (Aly) and Eutrema salsugineum (Esa) makes them a good model system to study adaptive stress response mechanisms. While their ability to survive extreme soil salinity is well investigated, their respective drought stress responses and differences to Ath are not well characterized. We use a combined large scale- phenotyping and transcriptomics analysis to study the dynamic response to drought of Ath, Aly and Esa. Our results showed that among species there are differences in morphology, physiology and transcriptome in response to drought conditions.