Differential Dynamic Changes of Reduced Trait Model for Analyzing the Plastic Response to Drought Phases: A Case Study in Spring Wheat

Abstract

Current limited water availability due to climate changes results in severe drought stress and desiccation in plants. Phenotyping drought tolerance remains challenging. In particular, our knowledge about the discriminating power of traits for capturing a plastic phenotype in high-throughput settings is scant. The study is designed to investigate the differential performance and broad-sense heritability of a battery set of morphological, physiological, and cellular traits to understand the adaptive phenotypic response to drought in spring wheat during the tillering stage. The potential of peroxisome abundance to predict the adaptive response under severe drought was assessed using a high-throughput technique for peroxisome quantification in plants. The research dissected the dynamic changes of some phenological traits during three successive phases of drought using two contrasting genotypes of adaptability to drought. The research demonstrates 5 main findings: (1) a reduction of the overall dimension of the phenological traits for robust phenotyping of the adaptive performance under drought; (2) the abundance of peroxisomes in response to drought correlate negatively with grain yield; (3) the efficiency of ROS homeostasis through peroxisome proliferation which seems to be genetically programmed; and (4) the dynamics of ROS homeostasis seems to be timing dependent mechanism, the tolerant genotype response is earlier than the susceptible genotype. This work will contribute to the identification of robust plastic phenotypic tools and the understanding of the mechanisms for adaptive behavior under drought conditions. Summary statement This study presents the estimated broad-sense heritability of 24 phenological traits under drought compared with non-stressed conditions. The results demonstrated a reduced model of the overall dimension of the phenological traits for phenotyping drought tolerant response including a novel trait (peroxisome abundance). Also, it displays that the adaptive mechanism through peroxisomes proliferation that is a genetic-dependent manner and related to the stress phase, since tolerant plants can sense the stress and maintain the cellular balance earlier than the sensitive plants.

Non-Invasive Phenotyping Reveals Genomic Regions Involved in Pre-Anthesis Drought Tolerance and Recovery in Spring Barley

“…Akin biomass, tipping time was affected by seasonal differences (see Supplementary Material ). Vegetative drought stress can delay flowering as reported for wheat (Sanad et al, 2019) and rice (Kondhia et al, 2015; Haque et al, 2016). Early biomass was negatively correlated with tipping, but with progressing growth and development, the signs changed ( Supplementary Figures S15 and S16 ), only disrupted by the wilting of plants.…”

“…Plant recovery is so far a mainly unexplored trait. However, a recent study in wheat showed that the ability to recover might be useful for selecting drought tolerant genotypes as visually scored plant recovery was correlated with grain yield under a vegetative drought set up in 16 diverse genotypes (Sanad et al, 2019).…”

Phenolic Metabolites from Barley in Contribution to Phenome in soil Moisture Deficit

“…The literature indicates that the consequences of moisture deficit are the most drastic for stress applied at generative phases [ 49 ] and that late stress causes more effects on phenotype than stress at the three-leaf stage [ 18 , 50 ]. The analyzed varieties already exhibited sensitivity to water deficiency at the early developmental stage in our study.…”

Impact of heat and drought stress on peroxisome proliferation in quinoa

“…Furthermore, H 2 O 2 content in leaves correlated negatively with yield. We also found a negative correlation between ROS content in leaves and yield under drought in wheat varieties (Sanad et al ., ). Together, these observations support the idea that ROS accumulation in leaves can be used as an indicator of drought‐susceptibility.…”

“…Abiotic stresses including drought, soil salinity, high light intensity and heavy metals are known to increase peroxisome abundance in Arabidopsis (Desai and Hu, ; Sinclair et al ., ; Rodríguez‐Serrano et al ., ; Fahy et al ., ), and drought increases peroxisome abundance in wheat (Sanad et al ., ). Peroxisomes were proposed as a cellular proxy of drought and stresses that induce ROS production (Smertenko, ).…”