Drought tolerance in maize through altered root system architecture
29 August 2016
Under drought conditions, the hypothetical steep, cheap and deep ideotype of maize would be expected to do best, and in a stand-out paper in Journal of Experimental Botany, Yingzhi Gao and Jonathan Lynch describe critical experiments to demonstrate that this holds true. Frank Hochholdinger puts these findings into context for the non-specialist in his Insight article in the same issue, and reflects on ways in which research on roots can catch up with other areas.