Drought Tolerance in Several Tagetes L. Cultivars

Abstract

Drought is the most important single environmental stress factor that reduces crop yields worldwide. In the context of global climate change, selection and/or development of drought-resistant varieties of cultivated plants is becoming an urgent need for agriculture in arid and semiarid regions. In this work we have analysed physiological (growth inhibition) and biochemical (proline levels) responses to water stress of 5 cultivars of Tagetes patula and 5 cultivars of T. tenuifolia. The most drought-tolerant cultivars were found to be 'Bolero' in T. patula and 'Luna gold' in T. tenuifolia, while 'Orion' and 'Luna orange' were the most sensitive for each species.

Understanding the Effect of Different Abiotic Stresses on Wild Marigold (Tagetes minuta L.) and Role of Breeding Strategies for Developing Tolerant Lines

“…Abiotic stresses are the climatic or soil conditions affecting the cellular homeostasis of plants, resulting in impaired growth and development (Mickelbart et al, 2015). The drought stress (Mohamed et al, 2000(Mohamed et al, , 2002Farahani et al, 2009;Cicevan et al, 2014Cicevan et al, , 2016Zulfiqar et al, 2020;Babaei et al, 2021), temperature stress (Forsyth and Staden, 1983), irradiance/shade stress (Kumar et al, 2014), waterlogging (Singh et al, 2003), salinity stress (Sahay and Patra, 2013;Sayyed et al, 2014;Chrysargyris et al, 2018;Pazcel et al, 2018;Moghaddam et al, 2019), heavy metal (HM) stress (Patel and Patra, 2014;Cid et al, 2016;Pazcel et al, 2018), and application of nutrient fertilizers (Walia and Kumar, 2021b) all affect the morphophysiological performance and secondary metabolism (essential oil) of wild marigold.…”