ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1591437
This article is part of the Research TopicMulti-Omics Strategies for Salinity and Drought Stress Mitigation in AgricultureView all 3 articles
Grafting enhances drought stress tolerance by regulating Proteome and targeted gene regulatory networks in tomato
Provisionally accepted
- 1VIT University, Vellore, India
- 2Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, South Gyeongsang, Republic of Korea
- 3Kyoto University, Kyoto, Kyōto, Japan
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Tomato, a widely cultivated yet perishable crop, depends heavily on adequate sunlight and water for optimal growth and productivity. However, due to unavoidable environmental and climatic changes in particular with drought the productivity has been decreased in the recent years. Grafting is one the ancient practice used for higher productivity and combating abiotic stress by regulating physiology and cellular processes. The present research was investigated in tomato to understand drought tolerance level at proteome and at transcriptome level. Initially at physiological stage two genotypes resistant to drought were selected for root-stock and susceptible ones as scion respectively. Initially, during the physiological screening stage, two drought-resistant genotypes of Solanum lycopersicum were selected as rootstocks, while drought-susceptible genotypes were used as scions. Among the six genotypes evaluated under drought stress conditions (e.g., based on relative water content, chlorophyll fluorescence, and stomatal conductance), the graft combinations G1 and G4 demonstrated superior performance. Therefore, these two combinations were selected for subsequent molecular analyses to investigate gene expression and stress-responsive pathways. In our studies, we observed that resistant genotypes grafted on susceptible tomato genotypes mitigated the deleterious effects of drought stress by improving their photosynthetic pigments and lowered oxidative stress. A proteomic investigation observed that resistant genotype grafted on susceptible one improved cellular response, metabolic processes, and response to stress. Moreover, a detailed transcriptome studies on DREB, WRKY, PIPs, SOD, CAT, APX, HSPs, and Lox genes depicted a greater stress tolerance in G1 and G2 graft combination.
Keywords: drought, gene-regulatory network, Proteome, resistant, Stress Tolerance, Tomato
Received: 11 Mar 2025; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mahapatra, Bae, Notaguchi and Muneer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sowbiya Muneer, VIT University, Vellore, India
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