Abstract
Global climate change, especially when involving drought and salinity, poses a major challenge to sustainable crop production, causing severe yield losses. The environmental conditions are expected to further aggravate crop production in the future as a result of continuous greenhouse gas emissions, causing further temperature rise and leading to increased evapotranspiration, severe drought, soil salinity, as well as insect and disease threats. These suboptimal growth conditions have negative impact on plant growth, survival, and crop yield. Potato is well known as a crop extremely susceptible to drought, which is primarily attributed to its shallow root system. With potato being the fourth major food crop, increasing potato productivity is thus important for food security and for feeding global population. To maintain a sustainable potato production, it is necessary to develop stress tolerant potato cultivars that cope with the already ongoing climate change. The aim of our study is to analyze the response of potato somatic hybrids to drought and salt stress under in vitro conditions; the somatic hybrids studied are the wild relative Solanum chacoense (+) Solanum tuberosum, with or without mismatch repair deficiency (MMR). Upon this selection of drought and salt tolerant genotypes, somatic hybrids and their parents were phenotyped on a semi-automated platform, and lines tolerant to medium water scarcity (20% compared to 60% soil water capacity) were identified. Although none of the parental species were tolerant to drought, some of the MMR-deficient somatic hybrids showed tolerance to drought and salt as a new trait.
Highlights
Freshwater shortage has become an increasing problem worldwide, which is the result of climate change, increased pollution, and overconsumption of water
The application of the in vitro and ex vitro stress selection proved to be an effective method for selecting moderate and/or severe drought- and salt-tolerant Solanum somatic hybrid genotypes. This stress selection was based on the evaluation of morphological traits and proline content of stressed plants
Parental lines were sensitive to water shortage; despite this, drought-tolerant somatic hybrids (SHs) with or without mismatch repair deficiency (MMR) deficiency and BC clones were observed
Summary
Freshwater shortage has become an increasing problem worldwide, which is the result of climate change, increased pollution, and overconsumption of water. The lack of fresh water does affect the accessibility to drinking water and leads to food shortage [1]. Around 85% of freshwater is utilized in agriculture. Out of the total land used for agricultural production, 40% constitutes irrigated areas [2]. Irrigation increases two to four times the crop yield production of an area compared with rain fed farming, but during long term usage it has a substantial drawback, i.e., it induces salt accumulation in soil, which adversely affects the production of various crops [4]. 6% of the total land area and 50% of irrigated lands are under the threat of salinity worldwide [5]
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