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Seed priming with brassinosteroids alleviates aluminum toxicity in rice via improving antioxidant defense system and suppressing aluminum uptake

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Abstract

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are growth-promoting hormones that exhibit high biological activities across various plant species. BRs shield plants against various abiotic stresses. In the present study, the effect of BRs against aluminum (Al) toxicity was investigated through seed priming with 24-epibrassinolide (0.01 μM) in two different rice cultivars. BRs application was found effective in confronting plants from Al toxicity (400 μM). The rice seeds primed with BRs showed enhancement in seed germination energy, germination percentage, root and shoot length, as well as fresh and dry weight under Al-absence and Al-stressed conditions as compared to water-priming. Especially under Al stress, BRs priming promoted the growth of rice seedlings more obviously. Al toxicity significantly increased the Al contents in seedling root and shoot, as well as the MDA concentration, H2O2 production, and the activities of antioxidative enzymes including ascorbate peroxidase, catalase, and peroxidase. Meanwhile, the photosynthetic pigments of seedling reduced under Al stress. When compared to sensitive cultivar (CY-927), these modifications were more obvious in the tolerant variety (YLY-689). Surprisingly, BRs were able to alleviate the Al injury by lowering MDA and H2O2 level and increasing antioxidant activities and photosynthetic pigments under Al stress. The results on antioxidant activities were further validated by gene expression study of SOD-Cu-Zn, SOD-Fe2, CATa, CATb, APX02, and APX08. It suggested that BRs were responsible for the mitigation of Al stress in rice seedlings by inducing antioxidant activities with an effective response to other seed growth parameters and reduced Al uptake under induced metal stress.

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Funding

This research was supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province (No. 2019C02011), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (No. LY21C130006), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32072127), and Hainan Provincial Science and Technology Plan-Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City Joint Project (No. 320LH032). Dabeinong Funds for Discipline Development and Talent Training in Zhejiang University and Collaborative Innovation Center for Modern Crop Production co-sponsored by Province and Ministry (CIC-MCP).

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  1. Farwa Basit and Liu Jiaxin contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Crop Sciences, Seed Science Center, College of Agriculture and Biotechnology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, People’s Republic of China

    Farwa Basit, Jiaxin Liu, Jianyu An, Min Chen, Can He, Zhan Li, Jin Hu & Yajing Guan

  2. Hainan Institute of Zhejiang University, Sanya, 572025, People’s Republic of China

    Jiaxin Liu, Xiaobo Zhu, Jin Hu & Yajing Guan

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  1. Farwa Basit
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Contributions

FB, JH, and GY are involved in the conceptualization, and GY and FB in design experiment. FB and AJ performed the experiment and wrote the manuscript. HC, LZ, and LJ assisted in writing and editing the manuscript. CM, JH, and ZX perform statistical analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yajing Guan.

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Basit, F., Liu, J., An, J. et al. Seed priming with brassinosteroids alleviates aluminum toxicity in rice via improving antioxidant defense system and suppressing aluminum uptake. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 10183–10197 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16209-y

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