Plants have a multitude of strategies for drought survival. Dehydration tolerance (DhT), is one such strategy that provides an opportunity to identify key genes, physiological traits, and ecological factors that could be used to reduce crop and species loss from drought. Here, Marks et al. demonstrated that Marchantia inflexa, a tropical liverwort, has moderate DhT.
Interestingly, M. inflexa has the capacity to acclimate to different environmental moisture levels, suggesting that DhT is plastic in this species. The authors demonstrate that males are less DhT than females, which may explain the female biased sex ratios observed in this and many bryophyte species.
