article · Antioxidants
Drought conditions significantly impair the growth and productivity of sugar beet plants, causing marked reductions in root dimensions, fresh weights, relative water content, nutrient levels, and overall sugar yield. Under water deficit, plants experience oxidative stress marked by increases in lipid peroxidation, electrolyte leakage, and reactive oxygen species, despite natural increases in antioxidant enzyme activity and proline accumulation. Exogenous treatment with silicon, proline, or a combination of both alleviates these negative effects. Over two growing seasons, applying silicon and proline individually or together notably enhanced root and sugar yields, sucrose percentage, and chlorophyll levels. These treatments also restored relative water content and essential nutrient levels, including nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Furthermore, the combined application regulated antioxidant enzyme activity, phenolic compounds, and proline levels while curbing cellular damage, demonstrating that dual treatment strengthens sugar beet resistance to drought stress.
Drought presents a severe challenge to crop production, frequently restricting agricultural yields and food supply. Understanding how simple external treatments like silicon and proline protect sugar beet physiological processes helps identify practical methods for maintaining crop health. This work demonstrates an effective chemical strategy to counter water shortage, protecting sugar yield and root development in agricultural systems facing dry conditions.
The findings suggest an applied treatment approach for sugar beet growers and agricultural input manufacturers seeking to mitigate drought damage. Exogenous application of silicon and proline represents an applied and tested intervention based on two seasons of trial data. Agrochemical developers could formulate these compounds into foliar treatments or soil amendments to protect yields in drought-prone areas, though full commercial deployment would depend on standard farm-scale validation.
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Drought stress deleteriously affects growth, development and productivity in plants. So, we examined the silicon effect (2 mmol) and proline (10 mmol) individually or the combination (Si + proline) in alleviating the harmful effect of drought on total phenolic compounds, reactive oxygen species (ROS), chlorophyll concentration and antioxidant enzymes as well as yield parameters of drought-stressed sugar beet plants during 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 seasons. Our findings indicated that the root diameter and length (cm), root and shoot fresh weights (g plant<sup>-1</sup>) as well as root and sugar yield significantly decreased in sugar beet plants under drought. Relative water content (RWC), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) contents and chlorophyll (Chl) concentration considerably reduced in stressed sugar beet plants that compared with control in both seasons. Nonetheless, lipid peroxidation (MDA), electrolyte leakage (EL), hydrogen peroxide (H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub>) and superoxide (O<sub>2</sub><sup>●-</sup>) considerably elevated as signals of drought. Drought-stressed sugar beet plants showed an increase in proline accumulation, total phenolic compounds and up-regulation of antioxidant enzymes catalase (CAT) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity to mitigate drought effects. Si and proline individually or the combination Si + proline considerably increased root and sugar yield, sucrose%, Chl concentration and RWC, MDA and EL were remarkably reduced. The treatments led to adjust proline and total phenolic compounds as well as CAT and SOD activity in stressed sugar beet plants. We concluded that application of Si + proline under drought stress led to improve the resistance of sugar beet by regulating of proline, antioxidant enzymes, phenolic compounds and improving RWC, Chl concentration and Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK) contents as well as yield parameters.
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DOI: 10.3390/antiox10030398
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