Pepper Crop under Climate Change: Grafting as an Environmental Friendly Strategy

Abstract

Pepper is an extremely important vegetable worldwide in socio-economic terms. However, persistent land use, monoculture, and intensified production processes have led to soil diseases. This, along with abiotic stress, and mainly salinity of soil and waters, water stress, and suboptimal temperatures, can lead to physiological disorders emerging in peppers, e.g., cracking and Blossom end rot, which induce plant senescence, and lower not only in yields, but also in product quality. Salinity and water shortage are the two main environmental problems that crops face in the Mediterranean Region. One way of overcoming stresses from an ecological or integrated crop management viewpoint is to use grafted plants as an adaptation strategy. Initially, grafting technology has expanded in Solanaceae and Cucurbitacea species to overcome biotic stress. Nowadays, grafts are being used as several approaches to cushion the impact of climate change on agricultural systems. Furthermore, grafts allow desirable varieties by organoleptic or productivity traits, but they are sensitive to abiotic stress and can be grown under abiotic stress. As far as we know, very few studies on grafted pepper plants under abiotic stress are available.

Effects of Mycorrhiza Inoculation and Grafting for Sweet Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) Crop Under Low-Tech Greenhouse Conditions

“…Pepper is a less common target species of grafting compared with tomato or watermelon (Penella et al, 2017), despite the fact that tolerance against drought, salt or heat can be improved with the use of suitable rootstocks (López-Marín et al, 2013;López-Marín et al, 2017;Penella et al, 2017); even more, efficiency of water and nutrient uptake can be enhanced (Ropokis et al, 2019), accumulation of heavy metals, e.g. cadmium, in the fruit can be reduced (Morikawa, 2017), or resistance can be reached against fungal or bacterial wilt (Jang et al, 2012;Matsunaga et al, 2015), against viruses (Penella and Calatayud, 2018) or against nematodes (Sánchez-Solana et al, 2016). As a result of the above effects, the overall plant mass, yield quantity and quality can improve (Colla et al, 2008;Camposeco-Montejo et al, 2018;Ropokis et al, 2019).…”

Postharvest UV-B and Photoperiod with Blue + Red LEDs as Strategies to Stimulate Carotenogenesis in Bell Peppers

“…Red peppers (Capsicum annuum L.) in particular are demonstrated to be an important source of carotenoids [3], flavonoids, and vitamins [4], being a powerful ingredient able to fight against ageing and prevent chronic diseases [5]. In this context, Spain is the fifth largest producer of bell peppers in the world after China, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia [6] and the first European exporter country [7] with 1.4 million tons.…”

High-Throughput Sequencing Reveals Bell Pepper Endornavirus Infection in Pepper (Capsicum annum) in Slovakia and Enables Its Further Molecular Characterization

“…is a vegetable crop of the Solanaceae family which is widely grown in temperate regions either for direct consumption or for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Both sweet and chili peppers are among the top ten most widely cultivated vegetables in the world [1,2]. However, pepper production can be often constrained by infections by viral pathogens, negatively affecting the yield or quality of the production [3].…”