Study
Programming desiccation-tolerance: from plants to seeds to resurrection plants
Farrant, Jill M.; Moore, John P.
Current Opinion in Plant Biology, 2011
Reviews the protective mechanisms shared between orthodox seeds and resurrection plants, including sugars, protective proteins and the management of the light-harvesting machinery during drying.
- Studied in
- Plantae
- Sample size
- review
Resurrection plants use the same protective repertoire as seeds — sugars, late embryogenesis abundant proteins, antioxidant systems — with the additional problem, unique to green tissue, of shutting down photosynthesis safely so that a drying leaf in sunlight does not destroy itself.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
The seed programme is necessary but not sufficient for a green resurrection plant, which must also solve the photosynthetic problem.
How NatureHQ reads it
The record that supplies the detail most accounts skip. A drying leaf is still catching sunlight it can no longer use, which is actively dangerous, and much of what a resurrection plant does during drying is dismantling or shielding that machinery rather than protecting itself from dryness as such.
- A short review of a field concentrated in a small number of study species.
- Mechanisms differ between species that keep their chlorophyll while dry and those that dismantle it.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Resurrection plants
Nearly every flowering plant already makes desiccation-tolerant tissue: its seeds. Resurrection plants appear to have switched that programme on in their leaves, rather than inventing tolerance from scratch.
Resurrection plants
A drying leaf in sunlight is still catching light it can no longer use, and that is actively dangerous. Much of what a resurrection plant does while drying is dismantling or shielding its own photosynthetic machinery.
Resurrection plants
The recovery is slower than the photographs suggest. Greening can take hours, but full photosynthetic function commonly takes days — and plants put through repeated rapid cycles fare worse than those dried slowly once.
Published by: Elsevier journalsPublished in an Elsevier journal.
doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2011.03.018
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.