Stress memory of physiological, biochemical and metabolomic responses in two different rice genotypes under drought stress: The scale matters.

Drought is a pivotal cause for crop yield reductions. When subjected to recurrent external stimuli, plants can develop memory of stress responses that, eventually, enables improved plant tolerance to environmental changes. In addition, despite causal relationships, these responses may vary according to hierarchical levels of observation. Thus, this study aims to check the responses of recurrent and non-recurrent stresses in two rice genotypes observing their drought memory responses at different levels of organization, that is, on a physiological, biochemical and metabolomic scale and for end in global PCA. For this, seventy variables were measured on the scales described in order to obtain a large number of observations. The memory responses were evident in almost all scales observed. The lowland genotype, especially plants not subjected to recurrent water shortage, showed higher damage to the photosynthetic apparatus under drought conditions, although it has exhibited more evident memory response effect after rehydration. On the other hand, the upland genotype appears to be more tolerant to drought insofar lower biochemical damage was observed. Specific behaviors of each genotype at biochemical and metabolomics levels and similar behavior at physiological level were observed. This study demonstrates the importance of observation at different hierarchical levels.

The passion fruit liana (Passiflora edulis Sims, Passifloraceae) is tolerant to ozone.

Passiflora edulis Sims is a liana species of high economic interest and is an interesting model plant for understanding ozone action on disturbed vegetation. In this work we hypothesized that P. edulis has adaptive responses to oxidative stress that enable it to tolerate ozone damage based on its capacity to grow under a diversity of environmental conditions and to dominate disturbed areas. We exposed seedlings to three levels of ozone in a Free-Air Controlled Exposure (FACE) system (22, 41 and 58 ppb h AOT40 and 13.52, 17.24 and 20.62 mmol m-2 POD0, over 97 days) for identifying its tolerance mechanisms. Anatomical (leaf blade structure and fluorescence emission of chloroplast metabolites), physiological (leaf gas exchange, growth rate and biomass production) and biochemical (pigments, total sugars, starch, enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant metabolites, reactive oxygen species and lipid peroxidation derivatives) responses were assessed. Ozone caused decreased total number of leaves, hyperplasia and hypertrophy of the mesophyll cells, and accelerated leaf senescence. However, O3 did not affect carbohydrates content, net photosynthetic rate, or total biomass production, indicating that the carboxylation efficiency and associated physiological processes were not affected. In addition, P. edulis showed higher leaf contents of ascorbic acid, glutathione (as well high ratio between their reduced and total forms), carotenoids, and flavonoids located in the chloroplast outer envelope membrane. Our results indicate that P. edulis is an O3-tolerant species due to morphological acclimation responses and an effective antioxidant defense system represented by non-enzymatic antioxidants, which maintained the cellular redox balance under ozone.