Temperature and Soil Moisture Stress Modulate the Host Defense Response in Chickpea During Dry Root Rot Incidence.
2021
Dry root rot caused by the necrotrophic phytopathogenic fungus Rhizoctonia bataticola
is an emerging threat to chickpea production in India. In the near future, the
expected increase in average temperature and inconsistent rainfall patterns resultant of
changing climatic scenarios are strongly believed to exacerbate the disease to epidemic
proportions. The present study aims to quantify the collective role of temperature
and soil moisture content (SMC) on disease progression in chickpea under controlled
environmental conditions. In our study, we could find that both temperature and soil
moisture played a decisive role in influencing the dry root rot disease scenario. As
per the disease susceptibility index (DSI), a combination of high temperature (35 C)
and low SMC (60%) was found to elicit the highest disease susceptibility in chickpea.
High pathogen colonization was realized in chickpea root tissue at all time-points
irrespective of genotype, temperature, and SMC. Interestingly, this was in contrast to
the DSI where no visible symptoms were recorded in the roots or foliage during the
initial time-points. For each time-point, the colonization was slightly higher at 35 C than
25 C, while the same did not vary significantly with respect to SMC. Furthermore, the
differential expression study revealed the involvement of host defense-related genes like
endochitinase and PR-3-type chitinase (CHI III) genes in delaying the dry root rot (DRR)
disease progression in chickpea. Such genes were found to be highly active during the
early stages of infection especially under low SMC.
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