ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
A Model-Guided Alternating High-Temperature Thermotherapy Achieves Complete Eradication of Sugarcane Mosaic Virus and Preserves Physiological Integrity in Saccharum officinarum cv. Xuezhe
Provisionally accepted
- 1Fujian Polytechnic Normal University, Fuqing, China
- 2Wuyou Ecological Agriculture Co., Ltd., Fuqing, China
- 3Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, China
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Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV) continues to undermine both yield and eating quality of the chewing-cane cultivar Saccharum officinarum cv. Xuezhe. Conventional thermotherapy at a constant high temperature can in principle remove the virus, but in practice it frequently causes serious heat damage, especially in heat-sensitive genotypes. In this study, we explored an alternating high-temperature thermotherapy (TAHT) scheme that was explicitly designed to eliminate SCMV while maintaining the vigor of axillary buds on rooted cuttings. Based on a uniform-design experiment combined with quadratic regression analysis, we systematically varied three factors—the maximum treatment temperature (42–48 °C), the duration of the high-temperature pulse (2–6 h in darkness), and the subsequent recovery phase at 38 °C (3–6 h under light) applied daily over a 12-day thermotherapy regimen—and assessed their effects on sprouting, rooted-cutting performance, and virus elimination. The model predicted an optimum schedule of 47 °C for 5 h (dark) including a 7-h recovery (validated experimentally) repeated daily for 12 days, which yielded axillary buds on 12-day-rooted cuttings that were completely SCMV-free by RT-PCR, with 97% sprouting and acceptable vigor. Under this regime, TAHT was associated with a marked shift in redox status, characterized by enhanced catalase (CAT) activity and reduced peroxidase (POD) activity, consistent with alleviated oxidative stress and improved tissue recovery. Overall, the model-guided TAHT protocol reconciles effective virus eradication with acceptable plant stress, performs better than constant-temperature heat treatment, and offers a practical, scalable, and environmentally friendly approach for generating virus-free sugarcane planting material, with potential relevance to other vegetatively propagated, heat-sensitive crops.
Keywords: axillary-bud cuttings (ABCs), Catalase (CAT), Classifier modeling, Peroxidase (POD), redox homeostasis, Response surface optimization, uniform-design experiment
Received: 23 Nov 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Dong, Hsieh, Zhong, Li, Zhang, Guo and Huang. 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:
Tung-Yu Hsieh
Guo-Qiang Huang
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