When University of California, Riverside, botanist Sean Cutler figured out how the hormone abscisic acid (ABA) helps plants survive drought, the discovery felt more like a burden than a triumph. His finding was in jeopardy of languishing unpublished because previous research on the hormone was tainted by suspect results and retracted papers.
In the 1980s, scientists learned that plants produce ABA when their roots sense dry soil. Somehow, the ABA stimulates microscopic pores (called stomata) on the leaves to close, preventing water loss. Exactly how ABA triggered this reaction, however, remained a mystery.
Early studies examined how ABA turned certain genes on and off, but these reports were found to be riddled with errors. Several articles were retracted, and the results in others were greeted with skepticism. Cutler’s work zeroed in on the START family of proteins, known ...
