Vinegar may help plants in drought
A warming climate brings increased risk of droughts for many areas in the United States and a need for more tools to help plants survive.
Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science in Yokohama, Japan, were surprised to learn that a little vinegar may help, according to an article published this summer in Nature Plants.
When studying the response of genetically modified plants to drought, the researchers noticed that some tolerated dry conditions much better. Curiously, these mutants accumulated higher concentrations of acetate, a chemical closely related to vinegar.
The scientists decided to see if simply watering unmodified Arabidopsis plants — a small, flowering cabbage relative — with vinegar could also do the trick. Of the plants that got very diluted vinegar (40 parts water to 1 part vinegar), 70 percent survived. Almost none of those that were given other acids or only water did.
It was surprising that such a simple compound helped the plants develop a survival strategy, one of the authors of the study, Jong-Myong Kim, said by email.
The researchers found similar results for other crops, including maize, rapeseed, wheat and rice. They think the vinegar acts like a signal telling the plant to follow a backup set of genetic instructions to cope with the drought.
Daniel Kliebenstein, a professor of plant sciences at University of California-Davis, said there’s still a lot to learn about how the response is triggered and the unintended consequences to other processes important to plant health.
Plants’ acetate response is also tied to their use of jasmonic acid. The acid, which gives jasmine flowers their fragrance, is produced as part of plants’ defense against insects and fungus. As a result, different levels of acetate could mess with the plants’ protection against pests and pathogens, he said.
Is it likely that people will spray vinegar across their fields to ward off drought? We don’t know yet, but it could be one tool out of many to keep plants healthy.