Dennis Psaroudakis

• Drought is one of the most common and dangerous threats plants have to face, costing the global agricultural sector billions of dollars every year and leading to the loss of tons of harvest. Until people drastically reduce their consumption of animal products or cellular agriculture comes of age, more and more crops will need to be produced to sustain the ever growing human population. Even then, as more areas on earth are becoming prone to drought due to climate change, we may still have to find or breed plant varieties more suitable to grow and prosper in these changing environments. Plants respond to drought stress with a complex interplay of hormones, transcription factors, and many other functional or regulatory proteins and mapping out this web of agents is no trivial task. In the last two to three decades or so, machine learning has become immensely popular and is increasingly used to find patterns in situations that are too complex for the human mind to overlook. Even though much of the hype is focused on the latest developments in deep learning, relatively simple methods often yield superior results, especially when data is limited and expensive to gather. This Master Thesis, conducted at the IPK in Gatersleben, develops an approach for shedding light on the phenotypic and transcriptomic processes that occur when a plant is subjected to stress. It centers around a random forest feature selection algorithm and although it is used here to illuminate drought stress response in Arabidopsis thaliana, it can be applied to all kinds of stresses in all kinds of plants.