Abstract
Climatic variations in the current environmental scenario require plants with tolerance to sudden changes in temperature and a decrease in water availability. Accordingly, this tolerance will enable successful plantations and the maintenance of natural and planted forests. Consequently, in the last two decades, drought tolerance and high temperatures in conifers have been an important target for morphological, physiological, and epigenetic studies. Based on this, our research team has optimized different stages of somatic embryogenesis (SE) in Pinus spp. improving the success of the process. Through this method, we can obtain a large amount of clonal material and then analyze the somatic plants under different conditions ex vitro. The analysis of the morphological and physiological parameters in somatic embryos (ses) and plants with different tolerances to abiotic stress can provide us with valuable information about the mechanisms used by plants to survive under adverse environmental conditions. Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the influence of high temperatures (23, 40, 50, and 60 °C, after 12 weeks, 90, 30, 5 min, respectively) on the morphology of somatic embryos obtained from Pinus radiata D.Don (Radiata pine) and Pinus halepensis Mill. (Aleppo pine). In addition, we carried out a physiological evaluation of the somatic plants of P. radiata submitted to heat and water stress in a greenhouse. We observed that the number of somatic embryos was not affected by maturation temperatures in both species. Likewise, P. radiata plants obtained from these somatic embryos survived drought and heat stress in the greenhouse. In addition, plants originating from embryonal masses (EMs) subjected to high maturation temperature (40 and 60 °C) had a significant increase in gs and E. Therefore, it is possible to modulate the characteristics of somatic plants produced by the manipulation of environmental conditions during the process of SE.
Highlights
In the current climate change scenario, research is needed to enable plants to have greater water use efficiency in different environmental conditions [1] and to develop drought tolerance [2] and thermotolerance [3]
embryonal masses (EMs) obtained from immature female cones of P. radiata, were collected from four mother trees in a seed orchard established by Neiker-BRTA in Deba (Spain) and P. halepensis cones were collected from five mother trees in Berantevilla (Spain)
At the end of the experiment, under high temperature conditions in a greenhouse, we observed a significantly increase in the instant transpiration in plants originating from established cell lines (ECLs) subjected to maturationtemperatures temperatures (MT) at 60 ◦ C, followed by 50 and 40 ◦ C
Summary
In the current climate change scenario, research is needed to enable plants to have greater water use efficiency in different environmental conditions [1] and to develop drought tolerance [2] and thermotolerance [3]. This thermotolerance can be achieved by changing the conditions in the different stages of somatic embryogenesis (SE) without it being necessary to enforce any change in the DNA, but only by allowing the formation of epigenetic memory [4,5]. The same observation has been made with Basque Country/Spain ecotypes, which are more sensitive to water stress compared to ecotypes from other parts of the world [2,9]
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