Yield, Mineral Composition, Water Relations, and Water Use Efficiency of Grafted Mini-watermelon Plants Under Deficit Irrigation
By Youssef Rouphael, M. Cardarelli, G. Colla, E. Rea. 2008
291 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Limited water supply in the Mediterranean region is a major problem in irrigated agriculture. Grafting may enhance drought resistance, plant water use eff- iciency, and plant growth. An experiment was conducted in two consecutive growing seasons to determine yield, plant growth, fruit quality, leaf gas exchange, water relations, macroelements content in fruits and leaves, and water use efficiency of mini-watermelon plants (Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. and Nakai cv. Ingrid), either ungrafted or grafted onto the commercial rootstock 'PS 1313' (Cucurbita maxima Duchesne · Cucurbita moschata Duchesne), under open field conditions. Irrigation treatments were 1.0, 0.75, and 0.5 evapotranspiration rates. In both years (2006 and 2007), marketable yield decreased linearly in response to an increase in water stress. When averaged over year and irrigation rate, the total and marketable yields were higher by 115% and 61% in grafted than in ungrafted plants, respectively. The fruit quality parameters of grafted mini-watermelons suchasfruit drymatterand totalsolublesolidscontentwere similar in comparison with those of ungrafted plants, whereas titratable acidity, K, and Mg con- centrations improved significantly. In both grafting combinations, yield water use efficiency (WUEy) increased under water stress conditions with higher WUE values recorded in grafted than ungrafted plants. The concentration of N, K, and Mg in leaves was higher by 7.4%, 25.6%, and 38.8%, respectively, in grafted than in ungrafted plants. The net assimilation of CO2, stomatal conductance, relative water content, leaf, and osmotic potential decreased under water stress conditions. The sensitivity to water stress was similar between grafted and ungrafted plants, and the higher marketable yield from grafted plants was mainly the result of an improvement in nutritional status and higher CO2 assimilation and water uptake from the soil.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Plant Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68dbfd2af04d8693e53eb726746816f8257bf620
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Citations in the corpus
- Agronomic Management for Enhancing Plant Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses—Drought, Salinity, Hypoxia, and Lodging (2017, background): “Other grafting experiments on the effect of drought on fruit crops, such as kiwis and grapes, proved that drought-tolerant rootstocks are available and useable under commercial conditions [62,63].”
- Influence of rootstock on vegetative growth, fruit yield and quality in ‘Cuore di Bue’, an heirloom tomato (2010, background): “…a horticultural tool to enhance tolerance to various abiotic environmental stresses such as soil salinity (FernandezGarcia et al., 2004a), drought (Rouphael et al., 2008a), low root temperatures (Rivero et al., 2003), heat (Abdelmageed and Gruda, 2009), and heavy metal toxicity (Rouphael et al.,…”