Natural variation in the chickpea metabolome under drought stress

Autor(en)

Palak Chaturvedi, Iro Pierides, Cristina López-Hidalgo, Vanika Garg, Shuang Zhang, Rutwik Barmukh, Anke Bellaire, Jiahang Li, Gert Bachmann, Luis Valledor, Rajeev K Varshney, Arindam Ghatak, Wolfram Weckwerth

Abstrakt

Chickpea is the world's fourth largest grown legume crop, which significantly contributes to food security by providing calories and dietary protein globally. However, the increased frequency of drought stress has significantly reduced chickpea production in recent years. Here, we have performed a field experiment with 36 diverse chickpea genotypes to evaluate grain yield, photosynthetic activities and molecular traits related to drought stress. For metabolomics analysis, leaf tissue was collected at three time points representing different pod-filling stages. We identified L-threonic acid, fructose and sugar alcohols involved in chickpea adaptive drought response within the mid-pod-filling stage. A stress susceptibility index for each genotype was calculated to identify tolerance capacity under drought, distributing the 36 genotypes into four categories from best to worst performance. To understand how biochemical mechanisms control different traits for genetic improvement, we performed a differential Jacobian analysis, which unveiled the interplay between various metabolic pathways across three time points, including higher flux towards inositol interconversions, glycolysis for high-performing genotypes, fumarate to malate conversion, and carbon and nitrogen metabolism perturbations. Metabolic GWAS (mGWAS) analysis uncovered gene candidates involved in glycolysis and MEP pathway corroborating with the differential biochemical Jacobian results. Accordingly, this proposed data analysis strategy bridges the gap from pure statistical association to causal biochemical relations by exploiting natural variation. Our study offers new perspectives on the genetic and metabolic understanding of drought tolerance-associated diversity in the chickpea metabolome and led to the identification of metabolic control points that can be also tested in other legume crops.

Organisation(en)

Department für Funktionelle und Evolutionäre Ökologie, Forschungsplattform Vienna Metabolomics Center

Externe Organisation(en)

Universidad de Oviedo, Murdoch University

Journal

Plant Biotechnology Journal

Band

22

Seiten

3278-3294

Anzahl der Seiten

17

ISSN

1467-7644

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/pbi.14447

Publikationsdatum

12-2024

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

106031 Pflanzenphysiologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Agronomy and Crop Science, Biotechnology, Plant Science

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 2 – Kein Hunger

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/a85ecb70-be9f-4ab2-be72-18e0f0a6f420