A Dicotyledon-Specific Gene Plays a Role in Bypassing the Tradeoff between Growth and Drought Resilience

Drought, which has become one of the most serious environmental challenges, threats not only current but also future global agricultural productivity and food security. While not as envisaged, plants tolerant to water-deficiency stress are typically accompanied by growth deficits and/or yield penalty. Herein, we report a previously undescribed, dicotyledon-specific gene SGI (Stress and Growth Interconnector) that is required to uncouple the growth-drought resistance antagonism, which strikingly conferring augmented biomass and yield in allotetraploid oil crop Brassica napus and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. These attributes are achieved by SGI protein factor that can simultaneously sustain better photosynthetic performances and higher ROS-scavenging capacities, via its interactions with all types of plant catalases (CAT1, CAT2 and CAT3), the well-documented dehydrins (LEA3 and LEA4-5) and established drought regulatory factors (VOC, NCA1 and LSD1) to maintain cell integrity during the prolonged, dynamic drought process as well as the subsequent recovery. This hypothesis is also supported by the spatial-temporal transcriptome landscapes illustrating extensive transcriptional reprogramming of pathways for regulating photosynthetic efficiency and stress acclimation. These findings yield crucial insights into presently unexplored mechanisms to circumvent tradeoffs between plant growth and stress tolerance, which inform strategies to breed higher-yielding crops with boosted resilience for sustainable agriculture.