S11 - Session P3 - Plant treatment in the early phase of development leads to plant tolerance

Authors: Simone Röhlen-Schmittgen *, Jana Zinkernagel

Plants are being able to cope with disadvantageous conditions by altering metabolic composition, in order to increase the antioxidative capacity efficiently. When being exposed to a secondary stress condition, plants can resort to the previous situation and confrere tolerance faster and more intensive with increase secondary compounds. This ensures the overall fitness of plants, and secures agronomical yield performance. Under climate-related and more frequently predicted periods of extreme conditions, horticulture faces immense future challenges. In this context, drought also has a major impact on vegetable production and particularly on quality parameters. The associated effects of drought might be mitigated by a prior stress condition. We therefore applied heat treatment at the very early plant developmental stage, and planted the treated and non-treated plants in a greenhouse, and supplied them half with sufficient water and the other half under water deficit condition, in order to improve drought tolerance. In this study, we found that heat-treated plants showed improvement in growth under water deficit condition compared with control. This finding indicates that plant growth and thus yield performance can improve by heat treatment as a promising measure for plant nurseries in vegetable production systems.