ORCID

Abstract

Adopting crops and agricultural practices that help sustain yield under abiotic stress will be a major element of future food security under climate change. However, little of the intensive research into the mechanisms of plant abiotic stress response has translated into improved yield stability. A suspected obstacle to translatability of research findings in this area is artificial experimental conditions, but we lack evidence to support this explanation. Here, we combined a meta-analysis and an experimental approach to compare the effect of salt stress on wheat yield, growth, and physiology across four distinct experimental settings: field/field-like conditions, potted plants in a climate chamber, in a greenhouse, and outdoors. The meta-analysis, comparing responses relative to control conditions over similar ranges of salt stress intensity, confirmed that field conditions led to more limited impact on yield than in the other three experimental settings and uncovered differences in how shoot and root biomass are relatively affected by salt stress between greenhouse and outdoors pot experiments. In our experiment, we identified very distinct responses for each of the four experimental settings, with plants outdoors accumulating more Na+ and proline than plants indoors, and shoot growth and yield were least affected by stress in field-like conditions and most affected in the climate chambers. Together, these results suggest that the nature of the acclimation mechanisms used by wheat to face salt stress can depend on the experimental setting. While our findings need confirmation for other crops and abiotic stresses, we recommend renewed attention to the conditions under which experiments are carried out and to favor more realistic growth conditions when possible.

Publication Date

2025-07-02

Publication Title

Plant Direct

Volume

9

Issue

7

Acceptance Date

2025-06-19

Deposit Date

2025-07-15

Funding

Funding: This work was funded by a Pump Priming Research Grant from the School of Biological and Marine Sciences, University of Plymouth. I have to share the credit for this work with many people who could not meet the criterion for authorship individually, but without whom this study could not have been completed. For the experimental part, I benefited from the help of an army of University of Plymouth undergraduate students who have been by my side on most days to run the salt stress experiments and collect the data: Bethany Smerdon, first and foremost, the best right hand one could hope for, Lily Cooper, Danny Hunt, Mariella Houweling, Finley Amos, Nick Elliott, Dante Underwood, Jessica Duffy, Thomas Langmead, and so many more. Your contributions were all greatly valued. A massive thank you to Demelza Carne for building the RBs and rain-out shelter; this was no small feat, and looking after the plants. Andy Atfield and Will Vevers also provided technical support for experimental data collection. I am grateful to Nick Smirnoff and Mick Hanley for their encouragement and advice. I want to give a wholehearted thank you to James Buckley, who gave me precious guidance for the statistical analysis of the meta-analysis, edited the manuscript, and was always available to discuss ideas. I also want to thank the two reviewers of this article for their extensive comments that have significantly contributed to improving the manuscript. Finally, I want to acknowledge all the people who generated the data used in the meta-analysis; this study is built on all their collective effort.

Download

Share

COinS