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Abstract

Strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duch.) is famous for the higher nutritional value of fruits. However, salt stress-induced adverse effects on the growth of strawberries (Zahedi et al. 2019). Increasing evidence showed that many exogenous chemicals improved the salt tolerance of plants, such as hydrogen sulfide and rare earth elements (REEs) (Chen and Shan 2019, Li et al. 2020). Among REEs, scandium (Sc), lanthanum (La) and cerium (Ce) have been shown to enhance the salt tolerance of plants (Huang and Shan 2018, Chen and Shan 2019, Elbasan et al. 2020. For Ce, its role in improving salt tolerance has been studied on many crops, including food crop maize, cash crop cotton and fruit crop grapevine, etc. (Gohari et al. 2021, Liu et al. 2021. The above previous studies showed that Ce was effective to alleviate salt stress, and the application of REEs in improving the salt tolerance of plants was focused on Ce rather than others. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicated that Ce also showed benefits in fighting against various abiotic stresses except for salt stress, including drought, light, heat and chilling stresses (Wu et al. 2017, Salgado et al. 2020. Therefore, the application of Ce plays a very important role in improving plant adaptations to the changing environment by mitigating the negative effects of abiotic stresses on plants. However, the effect of Ce on the salt tolerance of strawberries was still unclear. So, we preferred Cerium improves plant growth and fruit quality of strawberry plants under salt stress by changing the antioxidant capacity and water physiology