Abstract
Climatic variations adversely affect the limited water resources of earth which leads to water stress and influences agricultural production worldwide. Therefore, a novel approach has been introduced to improve the tolerance against water stress in herbaceous nature medicinal plants such as Coriandrum sativum by the usage of nanotechnology (foliar applied nanoparticles of ZnOx) coupled with the application of water deficit irrigation. This is an alternative water saving strategy that proved to be efficient to mitigate the Coriandrum sativum tolerance against water stress regimes for sustainable yield production through the activation of antioxidant system. Thus, the phenomena of green synthesis have been deployed for the formation of Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnOx NPs) from the leaf extract of Camellia sinensis L. and zinc acetate dihydrate was used as precursor. Different techniques have been used for the thorough study and confirmation of ZnOx NPs such as UV-vis spectroscopy (UV-vis) X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Elemental dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The prepared ZnOx NPs exhibit hexagonal wurtzite crystal nature has an average size of 37 nm with high purity. These ZnOx NPs have been further studied for their role in amelioration of water stress tolerance in Coriandrum sativum in a pot experiment. Two levels of water stress regimes were employed, IR75 (moderate) and IR50 (Intense) to evaluate the behavior of plant compared to full irrigation (FI). Results showed that under water stress regimes, the 100 ppm of prepared NPs stimulate the antioxidant system by increasing the activity of catalases (CAT), super oxidases (SOD) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) enzymes and found the maximum at IR50, while the concentration of malondialdehyde (MDA) decreased due to increase in activity of antioxidative enzymes. Furthermore, chlorophyll content and amount of proline also enhanced by the foliar application of prepared ZnOx NPs under moderate water stress (IR75). The results suggested that all the investigated agronomic attributes significantly increased, including plant biomass and economic yield (EY), compared to non-treated ZnOx NPs plants, except for the number of primary branches and LAI. Further, the 100 ppm of prepared ZnOx NPs have great potential to improve water stress tolerance in Coriandrum sativum by improving the antioxidant enzymes activity that enhance agronomic attributes for high crop productivity that require further research at transcriptomic and genomic level.
Highlights
Agricultural production is directly dependent upon climatic variation, which includes winds, temperature, patterns of precipitation, snowfall and oceans currents
The peaks present within the range of 400 to 680 assured the presence of hexagonal wurtzite ZnOx NPs due to phyto-accumulates of plants that provide the stability [64]. These findings are in coherence with the study of [50,57] that further supported the formation of required NPs using the phytochemicals as a capping and reducing agent of leaf extract. These results suggested that the hydroxyl group of alcohol, flavonoids, phenols, molecules of protein and various other functional group play a key role in the formation of stabilized ZnOx NPs
NPs of ZnOx were synthesized by using the leaf extract of Camellia sennesis using precursor (Zinc acetate dihydrate)
Summary
Agricultural production is directly dependent upon climatic variation, which includes winds, temperature, patterns of precipitation, snowfall and oceans currents. The growing population is one of the causes to increase in food consumption, which expands the irrigated area by eight times in the past 100 years and leads to drought conditions [4,5] These prevailing circumstances will increase the water scarcity and food security risk that badly affect the world economy on a larger scale. To overcome the water shortages in the future and ensure food security, many efforts have been made in agriculture sector to fulfil the global demands In this context, input of innovative environmental techniques that do not require substantial expenditure are important to increase the biomass production and yield of crops under water stress situations [6]. The usage of growth regulators and nanotechnology to enhance the development and growth of plants, ameliorate water stress tolerance and reduce negative impact on crop yield to increase food production are in trend [7]
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