Speaker
Description
One of the most damaging effects of drought on plants and crops is the reduction in yield and quality of seeds. Little is known, however, about the morphological changes happening in seeds at the cellular level when plants experience water limitation. And these changes include seed quality, composition, and offspring performance when the parental lines experience water limitation stress. Here we used electron microscopy and 3D X-ray tomography - two non-destructive high-definition phenotyping approaches - to evaluate the morphology and anatomy of well-watered and water-limited Arabidopsis seeds. When Arabidopsis plants grow under water limitation, plants produce a reduced number of seeds. Notably the reduction in seed number is also accompanied by a disarrangement of cell size and number. Interestingly, seeds from plants experiencing water limitation displayed lower number of cells but their size and volume were significantly different compared to well-watered plants. We also evaluated the performance of seeds, stressed or not, under different nutritional deficiencies and we found that seeds from plant experiencing water limitation had lower performance compared to well-watered plants. At the meeting we will further discuss our phenotyping and physiological approaches to understand the mechanistic basis of transgenerational effects of water limitation on seed biology.