Negative synergistic effects of drought and heat during flowering and seed setting in soybean
ORCID
Bheemanahalli: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9325-4901
MSU Affiliation
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Department of Plant and Soil Sciences; Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Creation Date
2025-11-19
Abstract
Rising intense heat waves combined with lower precipitations are the new norms of current global scenarios. These altered climatic conditions negatively impact soybean yield potential and quality. Ten soybean cultivars were subjected to four different growing conditions: control, drought, heat, and combined drought and heat to understand the physiological, yield, quality and molecular changes. Stomatal conductance was reduced by 62% and 10% under drought and heat, respectively. This reduction was further exacerbated to 93% when exposed to combined stress. The highest canopy temperature was recorded at +8 °C with combined stress treatment, whereas drought and heat exhibited +2 °C and +5.4 °C, respectively. Furthermore, combined stress displayed a more pronounced negative impact on greenness-associated vegetative index; the gene expression analysis further corroborated these findings. Each degree Celsius increase in temperature during flowering and seed-filling reduced seed weight by approximately 7% and 4% with and without drought, respectively. The seed protein increased under drought, whereas the oil showed a converse trend under drought and combined stresses. Most physiological and yield traits showed no significant correlations between control and individual or combined stress. This suggests that selecting crops for combined stress tolerance may not be appropriate based on nonstress or individual stress performance. Thus, incorporating combined stress-resilient traits into elite soybean cultivars could significantly boost soybean production under hot and dry climatic conditions.
Publication Date
6-1-2024
Publication Title
Environmental and Experimental Botany
Publisher
Elsevier
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Poudel, S., Vennam, R. R., Sankarapillai, L. V., Liu, J., Reddy, K. R., Wijewardane, N. K., Mukhtar, M. S., & Bheemanahalli, R. (2024). Negative synergistic effects of drought and heat during flowering and seed setting in soybean. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 222, 105769. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envexpbot.2024.105769
