This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: At the University of Missouri, plant scientist Ron Mittler is rewriting the playbook for how scientists study life by asking what happens when living organisms face multiple stresses at once. For decades, scientists have studied stress by isolating individual factors—exposing a plant to drought, for example, while controlling everything else.
That approach has helped researchers understand how organisms respond to specific challenges in a controlled laboratory environment. A plant growing in a Missouri field might face drought, heat and intense sunlight simultaneously. It could later encounter flooding, salty soil and pollutants.
Those stressors can occur at different intensities, for different lengths of time and in different combinations. Earlier this year, Mittler demonstrated that principle by exposing a model plant simultaneously to excessive heat, sunlight and salty soil. Its survival depended on a protein called bHLH35.
Plants lacking the protein died under the three-stressor combination, while plants with additional bHLH35 remained healthier. That protein does not play the same lifesaving role when the plant encounters each of these three stressors individually. It becomes critical only when heat, sunlight and salty soil strike at once.
That's why, in a commentary published in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Mittler and his team are calling on researchers to better reflect the complexity of the real world in their experiments. "If one protein responds to a certain stressor, let's say intense heat, and another protein responds to a different stressor, let's say intense sunlight, you might think both proteins get activated if those two stressors hit the plant at the same time," Mittler, a Curators' Distinguished Professor in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, said. "But we are learning the combination of stressors simultaneously can trigger a specific biological response that does not occur with either stress alone.
In other words, the biological response to A+B can be fundamentally different from the responses to A and B individually." The idea could eventually have implications far beyond growing more resilient plants. Understanding how multiple stressors interact could help scientists better study animals or ecosystems that are exposed to combinations of pollution, pesticides, microplastics, weather-related stressors and other environmental changes. This could eventually inform strategies to help protect biodiversity or reduce habitat loss.
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