Studies Provide Wheat Drought Tolerance Insights
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Academic
Three Different AgriLife Research Studies in Amarillo Have Been Aimed at Determining What Traits within the TAM Cultivars Provide Greater or Less Drought Tolerance
Although wheat yield and drought tolerance have been improved over the years by the Texas A&M Wheat Breeding Program, the physiological mechanisms of drought tolerance among the TAM wheat cultivars have not been well understood, according to Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists in Amarillo.
"Physiology and Transcriptomics of Water-deficit Stress Responses in Wheat Cultivars TAM 111 and TAM 112" was published in Journal of Plant Physiology; "Cooler Canopy Contributes to Higher Yield and Drought Tolerance in New Wheat Cultivars" appeared in Crop Science; and "Effective Use of Soil Water Contributed to High Yield in Wheat in the U.S. Southern High Plains" appeared in the Journal of Arid Land Studies.
Leading the AgriLife Research efforts from Amarillo are Dr. Qingwu Xue, crop stress physiologist; Dr. Shuyu Liu, small grains geneticist; Dr. Jackie Rudd, wheat breeder; Dr. Srirama Krishna Reddy, assistant research scientist; and Dr. Gautam Pradhan, a former postdoctoral scientist with AgriLife Research and now a North Dakota State University research agronomist.
Additionally, Dr. Scott Finlayson, AgriLife Research molecular physiologist at College Station, and Dr. Paxton Payton and Dr. James Mahan, plant physiologists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service in Lubbock, were a part of the projects. These studies were funded in part by Texas Wheat Producers Board, AgriLife Research and the USDA Ogallala Aquifer Program.
Rudd said it is not unusual for hard red winter wheat crops to experience moderate to severe drought stress, especially during the grain filling stage, resulting in significant yield losses.
TAM 111 and TAM 112 are widely grown wheat cultivars in the region specifically because of their drought tolerance, he said. While they share some of the same parentage and are always among the highest yielding under drought, they have distinct adaptationmechanisms under water-deficit conditions.
"We know that TAM 111 is the best performer under intermittent drought and TAM 112 tops the trial under long periods of sustained drought," Rudd said.
But because the physiological and molecular basis of their adaptation remained unknown, Liu and Reddy conducted a greenhouse study to understand the differences in the responses of the two cultivars to water-deficit.
Whole-plant data indicated that TAM 112 produced more biomass and grain yield than TAM 111 under water-deficit during grain filling. Leaf-level data indicated that TAM 112 had higher levels of the plant hormone abscisic acid, which results in partial stomatal closure to conserve water, as compared to TAM 111.
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