6 Conclusions and perspectives
The appearance and diversification of adaptations to dry environments and their underlying gene regulatory networks have been tightly shaped at cell, tissue and organismal levels during evolution. These adaptations were crucial for plants to colonize dry lands and survive variations on water availability in the environment. Carbon concentration mechanisms, desiccation tolerance and root impermeabilization are among the main plant adaptations to dry environments and share a similar pattern of convergent evolution in phylogenetically distant organisms. Detailed physiological and histological studies combined with recent genome and transcriptome sequencing techniques will allow to access how these adaptations evolved through millions of years. This information in combination with novel methods to simulate drought conditions (e.g. Marchin, Ossola, Leishman, and Ellsworth (2019)) and technologies for plant genetic modification (e.g. CRISPR/Ca9) will have the power to help on the improvement of plant performance in dry environments, specially in the current scenario of increasing climate change.