Mechanism of application nursery cultivation arbuscular mycorrhizal seedling in watermelon in the field

Abstract

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) colonisation of plant root facilitates the absorption of nutrients such as phosphorus (P) and enhances plant biotic and abiotic resistance generally. However, arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) colonisation decreases with application of chemical fertiliser. Here, we investigated whether AMF inoculation in nurseries would facilitate AM colonisation and take physiological and ecological functions in watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) in the field. Pot experiments were carried out to study the change of AMF colonised seedling on physiology and gene expression in nursery site. Field experiments were performed to investigate the effect of nursery AMF inoculation on yield, quality and disease resistance of watermelon in the field. The results showed that nursery-inoculated seedlings produced more dry matter and root surface area than non-inoculated seedlings. Expression of the secretory purple acid phosphatase (PAP) genes ClaPAP10 and ClaPAP26 was up-regulated following AMF colonisation. Accordingly, acid phosphatase activities at the root surface and P concentrations in seedling were enhanced. After transplantation to the field, the shoot dry matter and P concentration in old stem were higher in the nursery AMF inoculated seedlings than that in non-AMF inoculated seedling. AMF inoculation also induced increase of yields and decrease of wilt disease indexes and soluble sugar content. In addition, acid phosphatase activities and AMF spore densities were increased by nursery-inoculation in watermelon rhizosphere soil in the field. In conclusion, nursery colonisation AMF seedling enhanced watermelon growth and yield by improving the root growth and P acquisition in nursery cultivating stage, as well as optimised soil properties in the field. Nursery cultivation of watermelon seedling with AMF was an effective technique to reduce wilt disease in continuous cropped management in watermelon. K E Y W O R D Sacid phosphatase, arbuscular mycorrhiza, Citrullus lanatus, nursery seedling cultivation, phosphorus absorption

Foliar Applications of Nano Chitosan-Urea and Inoculation with Mycorrhiza on Kohlrabi (Brassica oleracea Var. Gongylodes, L.)

“…Inoculating plants with AMF increased significantly the concentrations of NPK nutrients within plant shoots. This might be attributed to the concurrent increases that occurred in the absorbing area of the plant roots via the extended mycorrhizal hyphae (Wiedenhoeft, 2006); beside of the increases that took place in P availability in soil (Bi et al, 2018;Ren et al, 2019). Also, AMF inoculation probably utilized organic nitrogen (Chen et al, 2018;Bukovská et al, 2018;Hestrin et al, 2019) that was found in farm yard manure while decreased N loses from soil (Teutscherova et al, 2019).…”

Analysis of global research on vegetable seedlings and transplants and their impacts on product quality

“…During early growth, this direct contact between roots and PBMs can benefit plant growth, health and vegetable nutrient quality. 151,152 Some recent researchers have focused on applying AMF in vegetables to improve seedling characteristics, such as dry matter content and root system in watermelon, 153 onion 154 and tomato. 155 Also, rhizobacteria have shown some positive effects in increasing the resistance to salt stress on tomato, 154 aubergine, 155 lettuce 156 and zucchini seedlings.…”

Soluble organic nutrients induce ClaPhys expression to enhance phytase activity of watermelon roots

“…The reaction was then stopped by the addition of 2 ml of a mixture of ammonium molybdate, ammonium metavanadate and nitric acid (1:1:2, v:v:v). The liberated inorganic orthophosphate (P i ) was measured by spectrophotometric method (Ren et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2021). Phytase activity was calculated as the difference between the P i concentration in the reaction solution with and without plant roots and expressed in milligrams of P i released per hour per gram of fresh weight.…”