Abstract
Plant adaptation to environmental stress generated by low water availability requires continuous search for moisture niches in the soil. Thus, roots have evolved a hydrotropic response to sense differences in water potential of the soil, and through asymmetric growth, roots can bend to avoid lower water potential sites. Different experimental systems have been devised for hydrotropism assays, which usually rely on air moisture or split agar assays. This latter system uses plates containing an osmolyte only in a region of the plate in order to generate a water potential gradient. Seedlings are placed on the agar plate containing normal medium (NM) so that their root tips are near the junction between NM and the region supplemented with the osmolyte. As a result, a hydrotropic response is elicited to avoid the low water potential medium, which is reflected in the root curvature angle.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Dietrich D (2018) Hydrotropism: how roots search for water. Plant J 45:523–539
Dalin C, Qiu H, Hanasaki N et al (2015) Balancing water resource conservation and food security in China. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:4588–4593
Jaffe MJ, Takahashi H, Biro RL (1985) A pea mutant for the study of hydrotropism in roots. Science 230:445–447
Eapen D, Barroso ML, Campos ME et al (2003) A no hydrotropic response (nhr1) root mutant that responds positively to gravitropism in Arabidopsis. Plant Physiol 131:536–546
Kobayashi A, Takahashi A, Kakimoto Y et al (2007) A gene essential for hydrotropism in roots. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:4724–4729
Takahashi N, Goto N, Okada K et al (2002) Hydrotropism in abscisic acid, wavy, and gravitropic mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana. Planta 216:203–211
Miyazawa Y, Takahashi A, Kobayashi A et al (2009) GNOM-mediated vesicular trafficking plays an essential role in hydrotropism of Arabidopsis roots. Plant Physiol 149:835–840
Saucedo M, Ponce G, Campos M et al (2012) An altered hydrotropic response (ahr1) mutant of Arabidopsis recovers root hydrotropism with cytokinin. J Exp Bot 63:3587–3601
Dietrich D, Pang L, Kobayashi A et al (2017) Root hydrotropism is controlled via a cortex-specific growth mechanism. Nat Plants 3:17057
Antoni R, Gonzalez-Guzman M, Rodriguez L et al (2013) Pyrabactin resistance1-like8 plays an important role for the regulation of abscisic acid signaling in root. Plant Physiol 161:931–941
Miao R, Yuan W, Wang Y et al (2021) Low ABA concentration promotes root growth and hydrotropism through relief of ABA INSENSITIVE 1-mediated inhibition of plasma membrane H+-ATPase 2. Science. Advances 7(12):eabd4113
Shkolnik D, Nuriel R, Bonza MC et al (2018) MIZ1 regulates ECA1 to generate a slow, long-distance phloem-transmitted Ca2+ signal essential for root water tracking in Arabidopsis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 115:8031–8036
Chang J, Li X, Fu W et al (2019) Asymmetric distribution of cytokinins determines root hydrotropism in Arabidopsis thaliana. Cell Res 29:984–993
Miao R, Wang M, Yuan W et al (2018) Comparative analysis of Arabidopsis ecotypes reveals a role for brassinosteroids in root hydrotropism. Plant Physiol 176:2720–2736
Murashige T, Skoog F (1962) A revised medium for rapid growth and bio assays with tobacco tissue cultures. Physiol Plant 15:473–497
Wells DM, French AP, Naeem A et al (2012) Recovering the dynamics of root growth and development using novel image acquisition and analysis methods. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 367:2245
Moriwaki T, Miyazawa Y, Fujii N et al (2012) Light and abscisic acid signalling are integrated by MIZ1 gene expression and regulate hydrotropic response in roots of Arabidopsis thaliana. Plant Cell Environ 35:1359–1368
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by grant PID2020-113100RB funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Garcia-Maquilon, I., Lozano-Juste, J., Alrefaei, A.F., Rodriguez, P.L. (2022). Hydrotropism: Analysis of the Root Response to a Moisture Gradient. In: Duque, P., Szakonyi, D. (eds) Environmental Responses in Plants. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2494. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2297-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2297-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-2296-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-2297-1
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols