Since we cannot solve the drought, we are creating plants that are 100% resistant to it.

Five amino acids. For 450 million years, everything has depended on five amino acids. A team led by the Blas Cabrera Institute of Chemistry-Physics has managed to identify the ‘minimal molecular code’ that determines how plants perceive and respond to water stress.

In fact, using crystallography and mutagenesis techniques, they have mapped the evolutionary history of that receptor. What’s more, they have shown that it can be rewritten.

What is water stress? It is, in essence, something key for plants: the hormonal apparatus of plants uses abscisic acid to detect when they have to activate or not activate procedures to calibrate responses to water restrictions.

We discovered how these receivers worked 19 years ago and, until now, we have not been able to obtain a commercial version that has benefited from this knowledge.

This is what the IQF people want to solve. After all, 10,000 years of agricultural selection have radically improved plant productivity, but have left it highly exposed to drought.

However, it is not that they have solved the problem. What they have achieved is, in reality, finding the grammar with which to rewrite the problem.

The good news: The EU has just changed the rules. For years, European regulation has been very conservative when it comes to gene editing and, although it is true that The Regulation of New Genomic Techniques does not resolve the problem, yes it is a big step forward.

Although, of course, that doesn’t mean much: almost 20 years of work has failed miserably. Perhaps the only difference (besides what we are discovering) is that we are running out of time.

Time? From the change in rainfall regime in the 80sSpain has experienced increasingly intense drought episodes. In these 40 years, we have experienced at least three very intense episodes. And the structural agrarian impact of all this is enormous: 13 million hectares are rainfed and we do not have water to reconvert them.

In the end, sooner rather than later, we are going to need those plants.

Image | Wolfgang Hasselmann

In Xataka | Spain faces its greatest agricultural challenge of the century: converting 1,901,529 hectares of olive groves into irrigation before it is too late