https://phys.org/news/2018-10-environmental-stress-tagging-rna-molecules.html

Their work shows that a tiny tag on RNA molecules—the transcripts that are translated to produce proteins—serves to stabilize and protect these strands of genetic material. When plants are exposed to high-salt conditions, the RNA mark, known as N6-methyladenosine, or m6A, prevents the breakdown of transcripts encoding proteins that help plants more effectively deal with the challenging conditions.

"This is how we're going to help farmers," says Gregory, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences and the senior author on the paper. "We need to identify ways that we can make more salt-resistant and drought-resistant plants, and manipulating this pathway might be one way to do it."