Creating Drought Tolerant Peanuts for West Texas

To make peanut significantly more tolerant to drought, heat and salt stresses, we proposed to create and analyze transgenic peanut plants that simultaneously express two genes, OsSIZ 1 and A VP 1. Overexpression of these two genes in peanut will likely significantly improve tolerance to drought, heat and salt stresses, which will have a major positive impact on the peanut industry in West Texas. The proposed research addresses the goal of National Peanut Board to increase peanut yield and to make peanut production profitable in water-limited West Texas. 
Without continuing support from NPB or TPPB, this project will have to come to an end. We will terminate this project at the end of August, 2014. In summary, we have been able to show that it is possible to make peanut significantly more tolerant to salt, drought, or to both salt and drought simultaneously by overexpressing foreign genes such as AVPl, AtNHXl, and IPT (Qin et al., 2011 and 2013; Banjara et al., 2012). We anticipate that as climate change brings dramatic changes in agricultural production in the US, especially in West Texas, there will be a need for creating heat-, drought- and salt tolerant crops including peanut. We are one step ahead in preparing peanut for the unavoidable outcome of climate change.