Energy availability can limit the ability of organisms to survive under stressful conditions. In Drosophila, laboratory experiments have revealed that energy storage patterns differ between populations selected for desiccation and starvation. This suggests that flies may use different sources of energy when exposed to these stresses, but the actual substrates used have not been examined. We mea...

A number of defined desiccation treatments without low temperature exposure were able to induce freezing tolerance in 20 cultivars of winter cereals. A maximal degree of freezing tolerance was induced in epicotyls at 24 degrees C in 24 hours at 40% relative humidity in rye and wheat, 7 days at 54% RH in barley, and 4 days at 70% RH in oats. Freezing tolerance was not correlated to water content...

Members of the genus Panagrolaimus are bacterial-feeding nematodes that occupy a diversity of niches ranging from Antarctic and temperate soils to terrestrial mosses. Some members of this genus are able to survive extreme desiccation by entering into a state of suspended animation known as anhydrobiosis. We have assembled a collection of Panagrolaimus species and strains and have investigated t...

SYNOPSIS. Drying to equilibrium with the air is lethal to most species of animals and plants, making drought (i.e., low external water potential) a central problem for terrestrial life and a major cause of agronomic failure and human famine. Surprisingly, a wide taxonomic variety of animals, microbes, and plants do tolerate complete desiccation, defined as water content below 0.1 g H2O g21 dry ...

Mechanisms of shrinkage and the conditions leading to cracking of drying soils are addressed. An elastic formulation of the hydro-mechanical drying problem is presented. It relies on the analogy which can be drawn between the desiccation process and thermo-elasticity. The validity of the analogy is discussed in the light of finite element simulations of air drying experiments on a rectangular s...

An experimental system has been developed which allows the identification of intermediates in the abscisic acid (ABA) signal transduction pathway leading to desiccation tolerance in plants. Desiccation tolerance in callus of the resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineum is mediated via the plant hormone ABA, which induces the expression of gene products related to desiccation tolerance. Bas...

The leakage of solutes from foliar tissue is utilized as a dynamic measure of apparent changes in membrane integrity in response to desiccation. It is found that rehydrating leaf discs of cowpea (Vigna sinensis [L.] Endl.) show increasing leakiness in proportion to the extent of prior desiccation, whereas Selaginella lepidophylla Spring., a resurrection plant, does not. The elevated leakage rat...

We show in bryophytes that abscisic acid (ABA) pretreatment of moss (Physcomitrella patens) cells confers desiccation tolerance. In angiosperms, both ABA and the transcriptional regulator ABSCISIC ACID INSENSITIVE 3 (ABI3) are required to protect the seed during desiccation. ABA was not able to protect moss cells in stable deletion lines of ABI3 (DeltaPpabi3). Hence, moss has the same functiona...