Abstract
The present study evaluated the physiological, molecular and hormonal parameters from scion/rootstock interaction of citrus plants during recurrent water deficit. Responses of the Valencia (VO) scion variety grafted on two rootstocks with different soil water extraction capacities, Rangpur Lime (RL) and Sunki Maravilha (SM), during three successive periods of water deficit: plants exposed to a single episode of water deficit (WD1) and plants exposed to two (WD2) and three (WD3) recurrent periods of WD were compared. The combinations VO/RL and VO/SM presented polymorphic alterations of epigenetic marks and hormonal (i.e. abscisic acid, auxins and salicylicacid) profiles, which were particularly prominent when VO/SM plantswere exposed toWD3 treatment. Upon successive drought events, the VO/SM combination presented acclimatization characteristics that enable higher tolerance to water deficit by increasing transpiration (E), stomatal conductance (gs) and photosynthetic rate (A), which in turn may have facilitated the whole plant survival. Besides providing comprehensive data on the scion/rootstock interactions upon successive stress events, this study brings the first dataset suggesting that epigenetic alterations in citrus plants triggered by recurrent water deficit lead to improved drought tolerance in this crop species.
Highlights
The present study evaluated the physiological, molecular and hormonal parameters from scion/ rootstock interaction of citrus plants during recurrent water deficit
Our previous results[18] demonstrate that the differences in plant growth, photosynthesis, metabolism and hormonal balance between well-watered and droughted citrus plants are highly dependent on the scion/rootstock combination considered
Were compared plants of the same scion/rootstock combinations analyzed in Santana-Vieira et al.[18] exposed to one, two or three successive cycles of drought to investigate the physiological
Summary
The present study evaluated the physiological, molecular and hormonal parameters from scion/ rootstock interaction of citrus plants during recurrent water deficit. Besides providing comprehensive data on the scion/rootstock interactions upon successive stress events, this study brings the first dataset suggesting that epigenetic alterations in citrus plants triggered by recurrent water deficit lead to improved drought tolerance in this crop species. Successive drought events have been shown to trigger permanent changes in plant responses in a sense that previous stress events can prepare the plant to overcome subsequent adverse conditions, characterizing a type of plant memory to these disturbances[3,4] This stress memory can be developed at different life stagesandis associated with changes in plant physiological and molecular processes[2,5]. Without any changes in the genome nucleotide sequences, stress events have been shown to permanently modulate gene expression via the activation or silencing via epigenetic mechanisms[3,8,9] One of these epigenetic changes is the cytosine methylation in the DNA7, which is a reversible process depending on dedicated enzymes. Besides promoting several modifications in plantprimary and secondary metabolites, citrus rootstock combinations have emerged as a interesting approach for unraveling the plethora of physiological and molecular mechanisms behind the drought-induced responses in citrus plants
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