Grantham Scholar Nitkamon Iamprasertkun’s project aims to investigate whether a crop can be both productive and resilient, or whether one comes at the cost of the other.
This study evaluates response variations between well-watered and drought-stressed in Arabidopsis thaliana accessions, distributed worldwide. This study attempts to clarify how various accessions respond to water limitation by a thorough physiological comparison conducted in controlled environments. By measuring critical parameters like water content, stomatal conductance, chlorophyll fluorescence, photosynthetic rate, and biomass, the study seeks to identify distinct physiological traits linked to enhanced resilience across these accessions.
Understanding these variations not only explains how the species reacts to abiotic stresses but also has great potential to guide and improve breeding techniques against extreme weather events, which can contribute significantly to sustainable agricultural practices, offering insights and potential solutions to tackle the challenges posed by climatic unpredictability, thereby securing global food production in the face of dynamic and changing environmental conditions.