Abstract
Modern agricultural systems are directly threatened by global climate change and the resulting freshwater crisis. A considerable challenge in the coming years will be to develop crops that can cope with the consequences of declining freshwater resources and changing temperatures. One approach to meeting this challenge may lie in our understanding of plant photosynthetic adaptations and water use efficiency. Plants from various taxa have evolved crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), a water-conserving adaptation of photosynthetic carbon dioxide fixation that enables plants to thrive under semi-arid or seasonally drought-prone conditions. Although past research on CAM has led to a better understanding of the inner workings of plant resilience and adaptation to stress, successful introduction of this pathway into C(3) or C(4) plants has not been reported. The recent revolution in molecular, systems, and synthetic biology, as well as innovations in high-throughput data generation and mining, creates new opportunities to uncover the minimum genetic tool kit required to introduce CAM traits into drought-sensitive crops. Here, we propose four complementary research avenues to uncover this tool kit. First, genomes and computational methods should be used to improve understanding of the nature of variations that drive CAM evolution. Second, single-cell 'omics technologies offer the possibility for in-depth characterization of the mechanisms that trigger environmentally controlled CAM induction. Third, the rapid increase in new 'omics data enables a comprehensive, multimodal exploration of CAM. Finally, the expansion of functional genomics methods is paving the way for integration of CAM into farming systems.