ArticlePlant physiology2021
Soil textures rather than root hairs dominate water uptake and soil-plant hydraulics under drought.
Article in Plant physiology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Separating intrinsic from extrinsic stomatal control in different soils.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Early signals of water limitations begin at the root-soil interface: linking rhizosphere drying to water uptake decline.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Drought response of the maize plant-soil-microbiome system is influenced by plant size and presence of root hairs.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- On the importance of rhizosphere conductance and soil-root contact in drying soils.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Responses of maize roots, rhizosphere enzyme kinetics and prokaryote diversity to alternating precipitation: insights from a three-year field study.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Mucilage facilitates root water uptake under edaphic stress: first evidence at the plant scale.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- The role of maize (Zea mays) radicle root hairs in seedling establishment under adverse phosphorus and water seedbed conditions.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Between Two Extremes:Plant direct · 2025Article
- All together now: A mixed-planting experiment reveals adaptive drought tolerance in seedlings of 10 Eucalyptus species.Plant physiology · 2024Article
- The effect of amorphous silica on soil-plant-water relations in soils with contrasting textures.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Root and rhizosphere traits for enhanced water and nutrients uptake efficiency in dynamic environments.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Review
- Bottom-up perspective - The role of roots and rhizosphere in climate change adaptation and mitigation in agroecosystems.Plant and soil · 2024Review
- Transpiration response to soil drying versus increasing vapor pressure deficit in crops: physical and physiological mechanisms and key plant traits.Journal of experimental botany · 2023Article
- Above and belowground traits impacting transpiration decline during soil drying in 48 maize (Zea mays) genotypes.Annals of botany · 2023Article
- Genome wide association analysis of root hair traits in rice reveals novel genomic regions controlling epidermal cell differentiation.BMC plant biology · 2023Article
- Plant Age and Soil Texture Rather Than the Presence of Root Hairs Cause Differences in Maize Resource Allocation and Root Gene Expression in the Field.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Coupled effects of soil drying and salinity on soil-plant hydraulics.Plant physiology · 2022Article
- Catastrophic hydraulic failure and tipping points in plants.Plant, cell & environment · 2022Review
- The impact of drought-induced root and root hair shrinkage on root-soil contact.Plant physiology · 2022Article
- Root hydraulic phenotypes impacting water uptake in drying soils.Plant, cell & environment · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although the role of root hairs (RHs) in nutrient uptake is well documented, their role in water uptake and drought tolerance remains controversial. Maize (Zea mays) wild-type and its hair-defective mutant (Mut; roothairless 3) were grown in two contrasting soil textures (sand and loam). We used a root pressure chamber to measure the relation between transpiration rate (E) and leaf xylem water potential (ψleaf_x) during soil drying. Our hypotheses were: (1) RHs extend root-soil contact and reduce the ψleaf_x decline at high E in dry soils; (2) the impact of RHs is more pronounced in sand; and (3) Muts partly compensate for lacking RHs by producing longer and/or thicker roots. The ψleaf_x(E) relation was linear in wet conditions and became nonlinear as the soils dried. This nonlinearity occurred more abruptly and at less negative matric potentials in sand (ca. -10 kPa) than in loam (ca. -100 kPa). At more negative soil matric potentials, soil hydraulic conductance became smaller than root hydraulic conductance in both soils. Both genotypes exhibited 1.7 times longer roots in loam, but 1.6 times thicker roots in sand. No differences were observed in the ψleaf_x(E) relation and active root length between the two genotypes. In maize, RHs had a minor contribution to soil-plant hydraulics in both soils and their putative role in water uptake was smaller than that reported for barley (Hordeum vulgare). These results suggest that the role of RHs cannot be easily generalized across species and soil textures affect the response of root hydraulics to soil drying.
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