Improving Flooding Tolerance of Crop Plants

Abstract

A major problem of climate change is the increasing duration and frequency of heavy rainfall events. This leads to soil flooding that negatively affects plant growth, eventually leading to death of plants if the flooding persists for several days. Most crop plants are very sensitive to flooding, and dramatic yield losses occur due to flooding each year. This review summarizes recent progress and approaches to enhance crop resistance to flooding. Most experiments have been done on maize, barley, and soybean. Work on other crops such as wheat and rape has only started. The most promising traits that might enhance crop flooding tolerance are anatomical adaptations such as aerenchyma formation, the formation of a barrier against radial oxygen loss, and the growth of adventitious roots. Metabolic adaptations might be able to improve waterlogging tolerance as well, but more studies are needed in this direction. Reasonable approaches for future studies are quantitative trait locus (QTL) analyses or genome-wide association (GWA) studies in combination with specific tolerance traits that can be easily assessed. The usage of flooding-tolerant relatives or ancestral cultivars of the crop of interest in these experiments might enhance the chances of finding useful tolerance traits to be used in breeding.

The Effects of Flood, Drought, and Flood Followed by Drought on Yield in Cotton

“…The interactive effects between two stresses are related to morphological adaptation and hormonal regulation [12]; when plants are subjected to flood followed by drought, their morphological and physiological adaptive response to the preceding flood probably enhances their tolerance to the subsequent drought. The most promising flood-adaptive strategy for plants is to form aerenchyma and adventitious roots to extract more soil oxygen [46], and cotton also exhibits this strategy [33]. In addition, cotton root vigor recovered after flood and even surpassed that in the unstressed treatment [20].…”

Immunoprofiling of Cell Wall Carbohydrate Modifications During Flooding-Induced Aerenchyma Formation in Fabaceae Roots

“…Increased coastal flooding and changes of annual precipitation are predicted to cause significant economic losses within the next century (Hirabayashi et al, 2013). To aid in mitigating the future economic impact of flooding damage on plants, significant research has been conducted in the field of crop improvement with regards to understanding plant adaptations to water immersion (Grover et al, 2000;Evans, 2004;Bailey-Serres et al, 2012;Valliyodan et al, 2016;Mustroph, 2018).…”

Phenol metabolism of two cultivars of durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) as affected by ozone and flooding stress

“…aerenchyma, Dennis et al, 2000), as supported by the findings of Pampana et al (2016) who reported a reduction of grain yield of two varieties (Claudio and Svevo) only when waterlogging was prolonged for more than 20 days. Although O 3 and flooding are similarly able to induce oxidative stress in plants (Mustroph, 2018;Sandermann, 1996), our data show that the phenolic response to these environmental constraints is stress specific, with a higher activation induced under O 3 than under flooding, another aspect to take into account when breeding future cultivars.…”

“…In most of these areas, durum wheat have commonly to cope with major climatic constraints, mainly elevated temperatures, drought and high O 3 levels, but also flooding (this is expected to increase in the near future). Most of available literature concerns O 3 effects on common wheat (T. aestivum L.), although durum wheat is also known to be both O 3 (Fangmeier, Brockerhoff, Grüters, & Jäger, 1994;Ollerenshaw & Lyons, 1999;Picchi, Francini, Nali, & Lorenzini, 2006) and flooding sensitive (Burgos, Stamp, & Schmid, 2001;Pampana, Masoni, & Arduini, 2016), even if somewhat contrasting results have been reported based on genotypic differences in tolerance and on intensity and duration of the stress exposure (Gerosa et al, 2014;Mustroph, 2018;Pampana et al, 2016).…”

“…and (c) improving our knowledge on the intimate mechanisms which module the stress-cell interactions, with special regard to the set-up of defence/detoxification reactions (Mustroph, 2018).…”