A major challenge in rice (Oryza sativa L.) production is to enhance water use efficiency (WUE) and maintain or even increase grain yield. WUE, if defined as the biomass accumulation over water consumed, may be fairly constant for a given species in given climate. WUE can be enhanced by less irrigation. However, such enhancement is largely a trade-off against lower biomass production. If WUE is...

Water deficit is a serious environmental factor limiting the growth and productivity of plants worldwide. Improvement of drought tolerance and efficient water use are significant strategies to overcome this dilemma. In this study, a drought-responsive transcription factor, nuclear factor Y subunit B 7 (PdNF-YB7), induced by osmotic stress (PEG6000) and abscisic acid, was isolated from fast-grow...

Water use efficiency (WUE) is a useful indicator to illustrate the interaction of carbon and water cycles in terrestrial ecosystems. MODIS gross primary production (GPP) and evapotranspiration (ET) products have been used to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of WUE and their relationships with environmental factors at regional and global scales. Although MODIS GPP and ET products have b...

An experiment was conducted to study the effects of different soil water potential (SWP) on soil water content, hot pepper’s yield, water consumption and water use efficiency (WUE) under plastic-mulched drip irrigation in the North-West China in order to find a suitable SWP to guide the pepper irrigation. Five treatments were set based on SWP, they were -10kPa (N1), -20kPa (N2), -30kPa (N3), -4...

Improving water use efficiency (WUE) may prove a useful way to adapt crop species to drought. Since the recognition of the importance of mesophyll conductance to CO₂ movement from inside stomatal pores to the sites of photosynthetic carboxylation, there has been interest in how much intraspecific variation in mesophyll conductance (gm) exists, and how such variation may impact leaf WUE within C...