Sean Cutler talks with
ScienceWatch.com and answers a few questions about
this month's Fast Breaking Paper Paper in the field of Plant
& Animal Science.
Article Title: Abscisic Acid Inhibits Type 2C Protein
Phosphatases via the PYR/PYL Family of START
Proteins
Authors: Park, SY;Fung, P;Nishimura, N;Jensen, DR;Fujii,
H;Zhao, Y;Lumba, S;Santiago, J;Rodrigues, A;Chow, TFF;Alfred,
SE;Bonetta, D;Finkelstein, R;Provart, NJ;Desveaux, D;Rodriguez,
PL;McCourt, P;Zhu, JK;Schroeder, JI;Volkman, BF;Cutler,
SR
Journal: SCIENCE, Volume: 324, Issue: 5930, Page: 1068-1071,
Year: MAY 22 2009
* Univ Calif Riverside, Dept Bot & Plant Sci, Riverside, CA
92521 USA.
* Univ Calif Riverside, Dept Bot & Plant Sci, Riverside, CA
92521 USA. (addresses have been
truncated.)
Why do you think your paper is highly
cited?
At the moment, there is tremendous interest in understanding how plants
cope with drought and other environmental stresses so that this basic
understanding can be leveraged to improve agriculture.
The hormone abscisic acid (ABA) is a key regulator of stress signal
transduction and has been validated as a target for improving stress
tolerance and yield. Because of this, many labs have been actively
searching for its elusive receptor for many years.
The field was really primed for the discovery of soluble
receptors—that is a big part of the paper's rapid citation rate.
Does it describe a new discovery, methodology, or
synthesis of knowledge?
"I think the improvement of crop yield using chemicals
that modulate ABA signaling is an exciting prospect that
has great potential."
The paper describes a new discovery—soluble ABA receptor proteins. It
also proposed a new model for how ABA signaling works, and this involved
some synthesizing of prior knowledge.
Would you summarize the significance of your paper
in layman's terms?
I think they are two-fold. By figuring out how ABA signaling works, we are
now in a better position to alter it and our work suggests new strategies
for engineering drought tolerance in crop plants. Secondly, we showed that
a synthetic chemical can activate ABA receptors—this opens new doors
for agrochemical development.
Historically, the main focus in crop protection has been on herbicides,
fungicides, and insecticides, but it is clear that there are other ways to
improve crop yield by modulating plant physiology.
What I think was nice about our Science paper is that it
simultaneously suggested new approaches for both the chemical and genetic
improvement of agriculture.
How did you become involved in this research, and
were there any problems along the way?
My lab is interested in combining both chemical and genetic approaches to
understanding plant growth and identifying new "druggable" targets. That
is, we are working to systematically define the proteins in plants that can
be controlled by small molecules. This led to the isolation of pyrabactin,
the ABA agonist we described in the Science paper, which we used
to isolate the new receptor proteins.
There were many problems along the way. We tried to publish a paper about
pyrabactin before we knew its precise mechanism of action, and the response
was not positive. As a result, I decided to hold out for a more complete
story, which involved a good deal of knuckle-biting, but I think it was
worth the wait.
Where do you see your research leading in the
future?
Personally, I think the improvement of crop yield using chemicals that
modulate ABA signaling is an exciting prospect that has great potential.
One hitch though, is that the registration costs for new active ingredients
are very high.
As a parallel approach, we have been examining if we can coax our ABA
receptors to be activated by existing agrochemicals. This strategy is
interesting because it will allow "off-the-shelf" chemistry to be
redeployed for new uses. I am quite excited about this idea.
Sean Cutler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Center for Plant Cell Biology
Department of Botany and Plant Sciences
Department of Chemistry (CFM)
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA, USA Web