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Plant Responses to Drought Stress and Exogenous ABA Application are Modulated Differently by Mycorrhization in Tomato and an ABA-deficient Mutant (Sitiens)

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Abstract

The aims of the present study are to find out whether the effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis on plant resistance to water deficit are mediated by the endogenous abscisic acid (ABA) content of the host plant and whether the exogenous ABA application modifies such effects. The ABA-deficient tomato mutant sitiens and its near-isogenic wild-type parental line were used. Plant development, physiology, and expression of plant genes expected to be modulated by AM symbiosis, drought, and ABA were studied. Results showed that only wild-type tomato plants responded positively to mycorrhizal inoculation, while AM symbiosis was not observed to have any effect on plant development in sitiens plants grown under well-watered conditions. The application of ABA to sitiens plants enhanced plant growth both under well-watered and drought stress conditions. In respect to sitiens plants subjected to drought stress, the addition of ABA had a cumulative effect in relation to that of inoculation with G. intraradices. Most of the genes analyzed in this study showed different regulation patterns in wild-type and sitiens plants, suggesting that their gene expression is modulated by the plant ABA phenotype. In the same way, the colonization of roots with the AM fungus G. intraradices differently regulated the expression of these genes in wild-type and in sitiens plants, which could explain the distinctive effect of the symbiosis on each plant ABA phenotype. This also suggests that the effects of the AM symbiosis on plant responses and resistance to water deficit are mediated by the plant ABA phenotype.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financed by CICYT-FEDER (Project AGL2005-01237). R. Aroca was financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science throughout the Juan de la Cierva program. We thank Dr. I. Taylor (University of Nottingham, UK), Dr. A. Downie (University of Kentucky Lexington, USA), and Dr. H. Shiota (Yokohama City University, Japan) for providing us with the probes for NCED, dehydrin, and PIP aquaporin genes, respectively. We thank Michael O’Shea for correcting the English text.

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  1. Departamento de Microbiología del Suelo y Sistemas Simbióticos, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (CSIC), Profesor Albareda no. 1, 18008, Granada, Spain

    Ricardo Aroca & Juan Manuel Ruiz-Lozano

  2. CSIC-Centro de Edafología y Biologia Aplicada del Segura, Department of Soil and Water Conservation, P.O. Box 164, Campus de Espinardo, 30100-Murcia, Spain

    Maria del Mar Alguacil

  3. Dipartimento di Biologia delle Piante Agrarie, Università degli Studi di Pisa, 56100, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Vernieri

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  1. Ricardo Aroca
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Correspondence to Juan Manuel Ruiz-Lozano.

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Aroca, R., del Mar Alguacil, M., Vernieri, P. et al. Plant Responses to Drought Stress and Exogenous ABA Application are Modulated Differently by Mycorrhization in Tomato and an ABA-deficient Mutant (Sitiens). Microb Ecol 56, 704–719 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-008-9390-y

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