Drought Stress Restoration Frequencies of Phenotypic Indicators in Early Vegetative Stages of Soybean (Glycine max L.)

The damage to crops due to drought is severe, and it is further exacerbated by global warming. Therefore, efforts to breed drought-resistant cultivars are being actively conducted. Various research to develop drought-resistant and sustainable cultivars of soybean (Glycine max L.), the most popular legume crop worldwide, are conducted, but it is biased toward the reproductive stages that are most severely affected by drought. There are few studies on the effect of drought stress on the vegetative stages due to a relatively small effect on the final product, but it is an important factor. Therefore, plants were subjected to 5% soil moisture for 14 days to assess the effect of drought at three different vegetative stages, and we measured the number of nodes of the main stem, the total number of nodes, and the number of pods. Although most of the unstressed soybean plants were dominant against the drought-stressed plants in certain cultivars, side node formation or the total number of nodes and the number of pods were reversed. Our results suggested that investigated response of phenotypic traits might be used as a selection indicator for drought-resistant soybean cultivars with further research and sustainability.

Automated summary

The damage to crops due to drought is severe, and efforts to breed drought-resistant cultivars of soybean are actively conducted. However, research on the effect of drought stress on the vegetative stages is limited. In this study, soybean plants were subjected to drought stress at three different vegetative stages, and the response of phenotypic traits was measured. The results suggest that these traits can be used as selection indicators for drought-resistant soybean cultivars with further research and sustainability.