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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1385985

High-throughput phenotyping reveals multiple drought responses of wild and cultivated Phaseolinae beans

Provisionally accepted
Jon Verheyen Jon Verheyen 1,2*Stijn Dhondt Stijn Dhondt 3Rafael Abbeloos Rafael Abbeloos 3Joris Eeckhout Joris Eeckhout 3Steven Janssens Steven Janssens 2,4Frederik Leyns Frederik Leyns 3Xavier Scheldeman Xavier Scheldeman 2Veronique Storme Veronique Storme 3Filip Vandelook Filip Vandelook 2,4
  • 1 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
  • 2 Botanic Garden Meise, Brussels, Belgium
  • 3 VIB, Agro-Incubator, Nevele, Belgium
  • 4 KU Leuven, Department of Biology, Leuven, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Although drought resistance of a plant may be achieved through morphological, structural, physiological, cellular, and molecular adaptations, most studies remain limited to quantifying the effect of drought on biomass. Using a high-throughput phenotypic imaging system, we evaluated the drought resistance of 151 bean accessions (Phaseolinae; Fabaceae) in an explorative approach, by quantifying five different traits simultaneously: biomass, water use efficiency (WUE), relative water content (RWC), chlorophyll content (NDVI), and root/shoot ratio. Since crop wild relatives are important resources for breeding programs, we analyzed both wild and cultivated accessions, most of which have never been evaluated for drought resistance before. We demonstrate that the five traits are affected very differently by drought in the studied accessions, with significant correlations existing only between the biomass and WUE indicators (r=0.39), and between the RWC and NDVI indicators (r=0.40). When grouping accessions by subgenus or by species, large intraspecific and within-subgenus variation was found. For this reason, we performed a cluster analysis, which grouped the accessions into five distinct clusters with similar response profiles. We also correlated the drought resistance for each accession to local climate variables at their original collection sites. The biomass, WUE, and RWC indicators were significantly correlated to annual precipitation (r=0.40, r=0.20, r=0.22, respectively), confirming that accessions from arid environments are generally more drought resistant. Our results demonstrate that the drought resistance of Phaseolinae beans is a multifaceted characteristic and cannot be simply quantified through biomass. Furthermore, the broader knowledge of the drought resistance of the accessions studied here may prove an invaluable resource for future crop production.

    Keywords: Crop wild relatives, drought, high-throughput phenotyping, Phaseolus, stress, Vigna, Water use efficiency

    Received: 14 Feb 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Verheyen, Dhondt, Abbeloos, Eeckhout, Janssens, Leyns, Scheldeman, Storme and Vandelook. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jon Verheyen, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, 3000, Belgium

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