The Metabolic Profile of Young, Watered Chickpea Plants Can Be Used as a Biomarker to Predict Seed Number under Terminal Drought

Authors

Sarah J Purdy
David Fuentes
Purushothaman Ramamoorthy
Christopher Nunn
Brent N Kaiser
Andrew Merchant

Publication Date

5-30-2023

Journal

Plants

Abstract

Chickpea is the second-most-cultivated legume globally, with India and Australia being the two largest producers. In both of these locations, the crop is sown on residual summer soil moisture and left to grow on progressively depleting water content, finally maturing under terminal drought conditions. The metabolic profile of plants is commonly, correlatively associated with performance or stress responses, e.g., the accumulation of osmoprotective metabolites during cold stress. In animals and humans, metabolites are also prognostically used to predict the likelihood of an event (usually a disease) before it occurs, e.g., blood cholesterol and heart disease. We sought to discover metabolic biomarkers in chickpea that could be used to predict grain yield traits under terminal drought, from the leaf tissue of young, watered, healthy plants. The metabolic profile (GC-MS and enzyme assays) of field-grown chickpea leaves was analysed over two growing seasons, and then predictive modelling was applied to associate the most strongly correlated metabolites with the final seed number plant

Keywords

carbohydrates, D-pinitol, kernel weight, metabolomics, phenotype, predictive modelling, yield

Comments

Supplementary Materials

PMID: 37299151