Abstract
Drought stress and pathogen infection simultaneously occur in the field. In this study, the interaction of these two stresses with chickpea, their individual and combined effect and the net impact on plant growth and yield traits were systematically assessed under field and confined pot experiments. The field experiments were conducted for four consecutive years from 2014–15 to 2017–18 at different locations of India. Different irrigation regimes were maintained to impose mild to severe drought stress, and natural incidence of the pathogen was considered as pathogen stress. We observed an increased incidence of fungal diseases namely, dry root rot (DRR) caused by Rhizoctonia bataticola, black root rot (BRR) caused by Fusarium solani under severe drought stress compared to well-irrigated field condition. Similar to field experiments, pot experiments also showed severe disease symptoms of DRR and BRR in the presence of drought compared to pathogen only stress. Overall, the results from this study not only showed the impact of combined drought and DRR stress but also provided systematic data, first of its kind, for the use of researchers.
Highlights
Chickpea is mainly cultivated in the arid and semi-arid tropical regions under rain-fed condition[1]
Several studies have documented the role of drought stress in the modulation of pathogen infection and effect of combined stress[9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]
We aimed to explore the impact of drought stress on the interaction of soil-borne pathogens with chickpea under the natural condition and intended to screen the most influenced diseases under drought
Summary
Chickpea is mainly cultivated in the arid and semi-arid tropical regions under rain-fed condition[1]. Incidence of CR19 and wet root rot[5] (WRR, Rhizoctonia solani) increases under high soil moisture These studies indicate that the three-way interaction of plant-drought-pathogen could be positive or negative. Such interactions are complex under field conditions, and it depends on the soil microbiome-plant phytobiome combination, and weather factors prevailing in the cultivation area[9,10,11]. These multiple stress interactions can occur in various possible ways, for instance, two stresses can either happen sequentially or else simultaneously[14]. We reconfirmed the outcome of field experiment by replicating pathogen, drought and combined stress treatments in well-planned confined pot experiments in the laboratory
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