Abscisic acid agonists suitable for optimizing plant water use.

Climate change and overexploitation of groundwater resources cause constraints on water demand for agriculture, thus threatening crop productivity. For future food security, there is an urgent need for crops of high water use efficiency combined with high crop productivity, i.e.

Rebuilding core abscisic acid signaling pathways of Arabidopsis in yeast.

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) regulates plant responses to abiotic stress, such as drought and high osmotic conditions. The multitude of functionally redundant components involved in ABA signaling poses a major challenge for elucidating individual contributions to the response selectivity and sensitivity of the pathway. Here, we reconstructed single ABA signaling pathways in yeast for combinatorial analysis of ABA receptors and coreceptors, downstream-acting SnRK2 protein kinases, and transcription factors.