Comparative Study of Growth, Cadmium Accumulation and Tolerance of Three Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Cultivars

Abstract

Trace metals (TM) contamination is a severe problem in the environment and produced an adverse effect on the productivity of crops. Cadmium (Cd) is a TM ranked seven among the top 20 pollutants due to its high toxicity and solubility in water, taken up by the plants and affects their growth and metabolism. In this study, we evaluated the growth, Cd accumulation and tolerance capacities of three chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) cultivars (NC234 (NC2), ICCV89310 (IC8) and ICCV89323-B (IC8-B)), subjected to two Cd concentrations (25 and 50 µM) in hydroponic culture. The toxicity of Cd reduced the plant height and fresh and dry biomass in all cultivars. The maximum reduction was observed at 50 µM of Cd. Compared with IC8-B, cultivars IC8 and NC2 exhibited better performance with high growth, biomass, root to shoot (R/S) ratio and water content under high Cd stress. To measure the accumulation of Cd in root and shoot, an inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES) was used. IC8 and NC2 had comparatively high Cd tolerance and accumulation ability (> 100 µg g−1 dry weight), with IC8 being more tolerant and accumulated higher Cd in shoot than NC2, while cultivar IC8-B was sensitive. Root accumulated more Cd than shoot in a dose-dependent manner. The bioconcentration factors (BCF) and bioaccumulation coefficients (BAC) were far higher than one (> 1) and increased with an increase in Cd concentrations, while the translocation factor (TF) was less than one (< 1), suggesting that all the three cultivars were unable to transfer Cd from the root to the shoot efficiently. Our results indicated that IC8 and NC2 proved to be resistant, while IC8-B showed sensitivity when exposed to high Cd stress (50 µM).

Ameliorative Effects of Exogenous Proline on Photosynthetic Attributes, Nutrients Uptake, and Oxidative Stresses under Cadmium in Pigeon Pea (Cajanus cajan L.)

“…These growth-inhibiting effects of Cd on pigeon pea may be attributed to the significant decrease in photosynthetic activities, nutrient deficiency, and excessive ROS production (Tables 1 and 2; Figure 1). Previous studies have reported similar reduced growth attributes in other plant species due to cadmium stress [14,15,52,53]. Photosynthesis is plants' life-sustaining process and is often sensitive to metal stresses.…”

Comparative Study of Zinc Fertilization in Two Wheat (triticum aestivum l.) Cultivars

“…Exposure of plants to Zn has been reported to affect root and shoot growth parameters, including root and shoot lengths, fresh weights and dry weights which are all considered very sensitive parameters used as indicators to the response of plants towards Zn resistance and toxicity. The degree of these effects are dependent on soil Zn concentrations, plant species, genotype and also plant tissue (Kumar et al, 2012, Shakir et al, 2020. El-Dahshouri et al 2017worked on the effect of foliar application of Zn on the sandy soil-cultivated wheat cultivar Sakha 94, which is studied in this work, and the wheat cultivar Gemmyza 9 from the same line of the other cultivar in this work, Gemmyza 10.…”

“…Zinc treatment in this work reduced the roots fresh weights of cultivar Sakha 94 by 45% in comparison with only 23% reduction in the fresh weights of the shoots of the same cultivar. Roots are the first plant organs that are subjected to soil pollutants, so they are more sensitive to metal toxicity than shoots (DalCorso et al, 2019, Huang et al, 2020, Shakir et al, 2020. The inhibition of shoots and roots elongation resulted from heavy metals treatment may be due to their influence on cell division (Hargemeyer, Breckle, 1996) or cell wall elasticity and metabolic activities (Naseer et al, 2001).…”

Improvement of cadmium tolerance and accumulation of Phragmites spp. Tabarka by ethyl methane sulfonate mutagenesis

“…There were three replicates for determining the Cd concentration of each plant. The accumulation of Cd in plant parts and translocation factor (TF) of Cd from roots to shoots were evaluated as follows (Ullah et al 2020):…”