The development of new strategies to increase drought tolerance of crop plants requires adequate protocols of stress models toperform efficient high-throughput screening of potential chemicalprotective agents or mutants and characterization of underlying tolerance mechanisms. Ideally, these models need to ensuresteadily reduced w to be applicable to mature plants, which commonly suffer from drought in fields. As we demonstrate here, theagar-based PEG infusion approach allows designing stress treatments of the desired severity. Moreover, it provides access tocontrolled low-stress conditions, which are hardly achievable byconventional soil models. Thus, application of the agar-based PEGinfusion technique to mature plants might be a useful tool notonly for applicative screening setups, but also in fundamental plantphysiology research