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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Adaptive Cropping Systems Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #341828
Title: Differing drought effects on potato genotypes grown in naturally sunlit Soil-Plant Atmosphere-Research (SPAR) chambers

Author
item Sicher Jr, Richard
item Barnaby, Jinyoung

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/5/2017
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: SPAR chambers are important tools in plant research that provide controlled environmental conditions with irradiance derived from natural sunlight. In this study, SPAR chambers were used to evaluate water stress effects on two potato genotypes differing in stress tolerance. Potato is a shallow rooted crop that is susceptible to yield losses during drought. We compared two locally adapted potato genotypes, Snowden, which is an established, stress susceptible, cultivar, and Harley Blackwell, which is a recently released, stress resistant cultivar. Drought treatments were imposed by withholding water from one-half of the plants beginning 10 days after tuber initiation and ambient (400 µmol mol-1) and elevated (800 µmol mol-1) CO2 treatments were maintained from planting to final harvest. Leaf water potential measurements showed that Harley Blackwell tolerated water stress better than Snowden in both CO2 treatments. Among 30 foliar metabolites, 10 differed by genotype, although 6 of these displayed an interaction with CO2 enrichment. These results suggested that a relatively small number of metabolites (13%) differed among potato genotypes in response to water stress although this increased to 33% when interactions with CO2 enrichment were included.