Increasing plant yield by modulating root hair development in Brachypodium distachyon

Root hair development has the potential to increase crop yields and at the same time to decrease fertilizer use, which will be required in the next 30 years to meet the demand for crop-derived commodities in a world with decreasing available natural resources. Root hair defective six (RHD6) encoding a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, is associated with root hair differentiation, and its roles are root hair initiation and elongation. Grass plants, rice and Brachypodium have been used as model plants to study the gene function of the root hair defective six like (RSL) subfamily which is orthologous to AtRHD6. The RSL subfamily has an identical gene function with AtRHD6 which is involved with root hair differentiation as well. Plants with longer root hairs within a species should have an improved Pi uptake efficiency; therefore, we would expect that a plant with a high Pi uptake could contribute to increasing the plant yield. We achieved increased root hair length by manipulating the RSL subfamily genes. It is expected that in these transgenic plants, the long root hairs would be sufficient to improve the Pi uptake and hence improve biomass and yield component (tiller, spikelet number, and spikelet weight) of the plant. Here, we demonstrate that Brachypodium transgenic plants overexpressing the BdRSL subfamily genes have an improved biomass and grain yield. The result of this study could be applied to important crop plants like rice.