Barcelona. An international research team led by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) deciphered the mechanisms of plants to adapt to climate change by applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
According to the university in a statement, advanced techniques of machine learning to identify, “for the first time”, the genes that allow plants to respond simultaneously to multiple forms of environmental stress.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communicationsdemonstrates a new approach to analyze multifactorial stress at the genomic scale and “opens the door to the design of crops more resistant to climate change.”
More than 500 transcriptomes have been analyzed – the sets of all the RNA molecules present in the cells of the model plant. Arabidopsis thaliana, subjected to different stress conditions.
This analysis allowed us to identify a core of stress genes, a set involved in the tolerance of plants to 10 simultaneous adverse environmental conditions, and the team found the regulatory role of ethylene, “which acts as a critical factor in this resilience.”
Ethylene, a plant hormone present in all stages of plant development, “coordinates and modulates the activation of key genes that sustain this resilience capacity,” and the team believes that these findings will allow the design of strategies for new plant varieties more adapted to climate change.