Global Warming: What Makes Zombie Plants a Focus for Researchers?

How to protect cultures and therefore the world's population? How can we make sure that despite successive droughts and temperature increases, the agriculture sector will continue to prosper and that the land is not threatened by the scarcity? So many questions that scientists from around the world arise.

Zombie plants to combat global warming

In the 1970s, Jill Farrant, a biology professor at the University of Cap, in South Africa, notes plants that seem to be straight “income from the dead”. She later learns that these plants are able to survive 6 months without water, after which their leaves brown, but with a little water they can green again in just a few hours!

As explained by a press release published by Hal Normandie University, this type of plants are called reviviscent plants and can constitute a solution to global warming since they “present the remarkable capacity to survive an almost total dehydration, the desiccation”.

However, for 30 years now has been concentrating on these exceptional plants. Most plants die when they suffer from 10% to 30%, while these plants are able to tolerate a loss of water around 95%! When they repel after a period of drought, they are not weakened.

The situation is serious

In contrastthe corn plants do not have the same leaf architecture or the same CO2 rate before and after an episode of drought. It compromises their growth even after the return of the rains, the BBC Carlos Messina, maize specialist at the University of Florida, told BBC.

These Zombie plants replace water with sugars such as sucrose. Their cells are filled with a chemical substance which slows down their decomposition and any chemical reaction. This technique, vitrification, is also used in the animal world, by Tardigrades for example.

For Jill Farrant, the situation is serious, and the future is not radiant with regard to the agriculture sector. Indeed, some climate models show that by 2100, “A large part of the agricultural land in sub -Saharan Africa and South America will be unfit for food production ”, relays the BBC. “” “We must therefore be incredible inventiveness ”, says the specialist.