Melatonin reduces oxidative stress and promotes drought tolerance in young Coffea arabica L. plants

Cleide Nascimento Campos, Roniel Geraldo Ávila, Kamila Rezende Dázio de Souza, Lillian Magalhães Azevedo and Jose Donizeti Alves

Agricultural Water Management, 2019, vol. 211, issue C, 37-47

Abstract: Water deficit severely compromises the homeostatic balance of plants and suggests a redox imbalance in cells. Melatonin is described as a promoter of stress tolerance in plants that induces the expression of stress-related genes, reduces lipid peroxidation and increases the antioxidant system. To analyze the influence of exogenous melatonin on the promotion of tolerance to water deficit, we applied concentrations of 300 μM and 500 μM to Coffea arabica L. seedlings. Here, we show that the intensity of the short-term responses to melatonin may vary according to the concentration of melatonin. We also report that lower concentrations of melatonin (300 μM) promote an increase in the root system and the protection of the photosynthetic apparatus, allowing greater gas exchange, greater carboxylation efficiency and higher chlorophyll contents. Moreover, melatonin improved the activity of the enzymatic and nonenzymatic antioxidant systems and reduced lipid peroxidation. In addition, we demonstrated that higher concentrations (500 μM) caused negative effects on stress tolerance, thus demonstrating a toxic level. Overall, these results demonstrated that melatonin mediates the signaling for water deficit responses by acting as an inductor of tolerance, most likely enhanced by increased carboxylation efficiency and antioxidant systems. This study provides evidence that exogenous melatonin protects coffee against water deficit.

Keywords: Antioxidant; Water deficit; Gas exchange; Carbohydrate metabolism; Coffee (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377418314215
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:211:y:2019:i:c:p:37-47

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2018.09.025

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().