Alejandra Quinones

and 4 more

Global warming poses a substantial threat to food security, necessitating the development of crops resilient to the adverse effects of stress including, drought, heat, and their combined impact. To understand maize responses to individual and combined stress conditions of drought and heat at early vegetative stages, we did a comprehensive evaluation of the phenotypic responses of 47 diverse maize inbred lines. The plants were stressed for 13 days beginning at 7 days after planting, with heat stress conditions of 38/28°C day/night cycles, and the drought condition was achieved by reducing the water pot volume from 88 to 40% over the course of the experiment. The Bellwether Phenotyping Facility, a high-throughput phenotyping platform, was used to capture daily RGB images of the plants throughout the experiment. We extracted morphological and color-related traits from the images, and particular interest was placed on traits that exhibited high broad-sense heritability throughout the experiment. This approach allowed for the collection of a robust dataset of phenotypic responses. Our results revealed distinct responses among the maize genotypes under different stress conditions, with the combined drought and heat treatment leading to the most severe impairments in plant height and leaf area. To gain further insights, we applied a time series analysis to the extracted traits and created groups with dynamically-similar response patterns. This research is foundational for understanding maize stress responses to heat and drought conditions and will inform future work towards identifying important genes and molecular mechanisms, particularly in the context of combined stressors.

Leonardo W. Lima

and 5 more

This study aimed to investigate the physiological and morphological responses of maize seedlings to environmental stressors. High-throughput imaging analysis was used to characterize the stress response phenotypes of 47 distinct maize genotypes exposed to water limitation (40% field capacity), heat (38 °C), and the combination of the two stresses. RGB and NIR images were collected daily, and analyzed with open-source, open-development software PlantCV. Our investigation focused on quantitative measurements of daily area, daily water loss, evaluation of estimated water use efficiency (WUE), and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance as an estimation of water content in tissues. Quantitatively comparing two non-normal distributions, like the NIR histogram data, can be challenging but important, since metrics like median mode values often do not capture variation across a sample. One of the primary obstacles lies in defining an appropriate metric to accurately quantify the variation between two distributions. To analyze NIR reflectance, we evaluated the dissimilarity between pairwise NIR histograms by utilizing the earth mover’s distance (EMD) analysis. The EMD quantifies the difference between two NIR reflectance distributions, and therefore indirectly evaluates the difference in leaf water content for stress vs control conditions. Overall, most genotypes displayed growth reduction under drought and heat. Interestingly, specific lines exhibited heightened WUE under water limitation, suggesting response to water scarcity. EMD results showing dissimilarities in pairwise NIR reflectance of control vs drought, can be used to describe variation in dynamic changes in water content levels among these groups.