Development of a phenotyping protocol for combined drought and salinity stress at seedling stage in rice

Introduction: The case of combined drought and salinity stress is increasingly becoming a constraint to rice production, especially in coastal areas and river deltas where low rainfall not only reduces soil moisture levels but also reduces the flow of river water, resulting in intrusion of saline sea-water. A standardized screening method is needed in order to systematically evaluate rice cultivars under combined drought+salinity at the same time because sequential stress of salinity followed by drought or vice-versa is not similar to simultaneous stress effects. Therefore, we aimed to develop a screening protocol for combined drought+salinity stress applied to soil-grown plants at seedling stage.

Methods: The study system used 30-L soil-filled boxes, which allowed a comparison of plant growth under control conditions, individual drought and salinity stress, as well as combined drought+salinity. A set of salinity tolerant and drought tolerant cultivars were tested, together with several popular but salinity and drought-susceptible varieties that are grown in regions prone to combined drought+salinity. A range of treatments were tested including different timings of the drought and salinity application, and different severities of stress, in order to determine the most effective that resulted in visible distinction among cultivars. The challenges related to determining a protocol with repeatable seedling stage stress treatment effects while achieving a uniform plant stand are described here.

Results: The optimized protocol simultaneously applied both stresses by planting into saline soil at 75% of field capacity which was then allowed to undergo progressive drydown. Meanwhile, physiological characterization revealed that chlorophyll fluorescence at seedling stage correlated well with grain yield when drought stress was applied to vegetative stage only.

Discussion: The drought+salinity protocol developed here can be used for screening rice breeding populations as part of a pipeline to develop new rice varieties with improved adaptation to combined stresses.