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Drought priming at vegetative growth stages improves tolerance to drought and heat stresses occurring during grain filling in spring wheat

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Abstract

Plants of spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. Vinjett) were exposed to moderate water deficit at the vegetative growth stages six-leaf and/or stem elongation to investigate drought priming effects on tolerance to drought and heat stress events occurring during the grain filling stage. Compared with the non-primed plants, drought priming could alleviate photo-inhibition in flag leaves caused by drought and heat stress episodes during grain filling. In the primed plants, drought stress inhibited photosynthesis mainly through decrease of maximum photosynthetic electron transport rate, while decrease of the carboxylation efficiency limited photosynthesis under heat stress. The higher saturated net photosynthetic rate of flag leaves coincided with the lowered non-photochemical quenching rates in the twice-primed plants under drought stress and in the primed plants during stem elongation under heat stress. Compared to the non-priming treatment, drought priming either applied once or twice alleviated the grain yield reduction by drought stress during grain filling, and priming during the stem elongation stage alleviated yield loss by heat stress at grain filling. The higher concentration of abscisic acid in primed plants under drought stress could contribute to higher grain yield compared to the non-primed plants. Taken together, the results indicate that drought priming during vegetative stages improved tolerance to both drought and heat stress events occurring during grain filling in wheat.

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Abbreviations

ABA:

Abscisic acid

Asat :

Saturated net photosynthetic rate

A/Ci curve:

Carbon assimilation versus intercellular CO2 concentration curve

Jmax :

Maximum photosynthetic electron transport rate

LRWC:

Leaf relative water content

PSII:

Photosystem II

NPQ:

Non-photochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence

ΦPSII:

Actual PSII photochemical efficiency

Rubisco:

Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase

Vmax :

Maximum carboxylation rate of Rubisco

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for financial support from the Chinese Scholarship Council for the stay of X.W. in Denmark and from the Danish Ministry for Agriculture (to B.W.) for this study. We are grateful for the skillful help of the technicians at the Research Centre Flakkebjerg of Aarhus University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Crop Physiology and Ecology in Southern China, Ministry of Agriculture/National Engineering and Technology Center for Information Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

    Xiao Wang & Dong Jiang

  2. Faculty of Science and Technology, Institute of Agroecology, Research Centre Flakkebjerg, Aarhus University, 4200, Slagelse, Denmark

    Xiao Wang, Marija Vignjevic & Bernd Wollenweber

  3. Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Højbakkegaard Allé 13, 2630, Taastrup, Denmark

    Fulai Liu

  4. Enzyme and Protein Chemistry, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Building 224, 2800, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

    Xiao Wang & Susanne Jacobsen

Authors
  1. Xiao Wang
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  2. Marija Vignjevic
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  3. Fulai Liu
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  4. Susanne Jacobsen
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  5. Dong Jiang
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  6. Bernd Wollenweber
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Correspondence to Dong Jiang or Bernd Wollenweber.

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Wang, X., Vignjevic, M., Liu, F. et al. Drought priming at vegetative growth stages improves tolerance to drought and heat stresses occurring during grain filling in spring wheat. Plant Growth Regul 75, 677–687 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10725-014-9969-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10725-014-9969-x

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