Vienna, Feb. 10 -- As climate change accelerates, plants are under increasing pressure to adapt to changing habitats and environmental conditions.

This challenge is especially urgent for crops, as drought and heat-resistant plants are critical to ensuring food security in an unpredictable future. Fortunately, plants can adapt astonishingly well to a variety of settings and temperatures: Arabidopsis thaliana, for example, thrives in climates as disparate as Sweden and Italy.

The study, by the labs of Liam Dolan and Frederic Berger at the Gregor Mendel Institute (GMI) of Molecular Plant Biology, as well as Kelly Swarts, former GMI group leader and now at the Umea Plant Science Centre, and Masaki Shimamura at Hiroshima University.

Underst...