ArticleAnnals of botany2025
Root mucilage enhances plant water use under combined soil and atmospheric drought.
Article in Annals of botany, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Maize root mucilage alters stomatal responses to soil and atmospheric drought: Implications for plant water use.Plant physiology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsPlants have evolved various root adaptive traits to enhance their ability to access soil water in stressful conditions. Although root mucilage has been suggested to facilitate root water uptake in drying soils, its impact during combined edaphic and atmospheric stress remains unknown. We hypothesized that mucilage decreases the saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, and consequently, a genotype with high mucilage production will exhibit lower maximum soil-plant hydraulic conductance and restrict transpiration at relatively low vapour pressure deficit (VPD). On the contrary, in drying soil, mucilage attenuates the gradients in matric potential at the root-soil interface and thus facilitates root water uptake, especially at high VPD.
methodsWe compared two cowpea genotypes with contrasting mucilage production rates and subjected them to three consecutively increasing levels of VPD (1.04, 1.8 and 2.8 kPa) while the soil was left to dry out. We measured the transpiration rate and soil and leaf water potentials and estimated canopy and plant hydraulic conductance during soil drying. KEY
resultsIn wet soil conditions, the high-mucilage genotype restricted transpiration rate at lower VPD (1.46 kPa) compared with the low-mucilage genotype (1.58 kPa). Likewise, the initial slope of transpiration rate in response to VPD (the maximum conductance) was significantly lower in the high- compared with the low-mucilage genotype. During soil drying, the transpiration rate declined earlier in the low- compared with the high-mucilage genotype, supporting the hypothesis that mucilage helps to maintain the hydraulic continuity between roots and soil at lower water potentials in the high-mucilage genotype.
conclusionsRoot mucilage is a promising trait that reduces water use in wet soil conditions, thereby conserving soil moisture for critical phases (e.g. flowering and grain filling), both on a daily basis (increasing VPD) and on a seasonal time scale (soil drying).
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.