Hello,
I want to set up a drought-response experiment. Should i consider using the green house or the field. Secondly, will 100 accessions of this crop be too much for the experiment? Lastly, will there be a need for replication experiment? What studies can be performed to achieve the set objective. My objectives are to determine the molecular responses of this crop (at the plant, root, and rhizosphere levels) to drought stress at various water levels.
Thanks in advance.
It depends on your environmental conditions. Greenhouse is better if there is rain, besides, for a drought experiment you would need to check humidity in the substrate, and for that you would need different pots or chambers depending on the level of the drought. 100 accessions is not clear, you mean 100 individuals or 100 different provenances? Because then you would need a number of individuals for each provenance. Repetitions are needed if your are thinking in experimental blocks.
Perform statistical design of experiment using ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) patterns as references.
What crop are you using. Greenhouses give you the best control. Different size crops will use water a diffeent rates so desired drought conditions per pot ill require different intervals of watering. Water potential of the plant would definitely be the best way to measure drought stress. You definitely need replications.
Ofelia Andrea Valdés Rodríguez : thanks for the information, really appreciate. Jose Felizco: thanks but i really don't get the ENZO idea and how to relate it. Kurt Henry Johnsen: The crop is bambara groundnut. It does not produce seeds with experiments performed in the greenhouse, so i need help on how to go about the experiment on the field. Thanks
What is your climate (rainfall, temp) the time of year you are doing the study? You can use irrigation to acheive the levels of drought.
Drought stress experiments can be misleading when performed on plants with large variability in vigour: vigorous genotypes deplete rapidly available water and suffer rapidly from drought, whereas drought stress is delayed for slowly growing genotypes. Thus you cannot disentangle vigour from drought resistance. That's why François Tardieu (one of his paper, not about this subject : Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 25–31, 2012 doi:10.1093/jxb/err269) set up fairly complex experiments in greenhouses where each pot is daily weighted and watered so as to apply the same water stress to all genotypes.
In the same way, water exclusion experiments are difficult to set-up, because often the water exclusion device do have other effects on the ecosystem. Jean-Paul Laclau in Brazil used maybe the only reliable system with gutters in eucalyptus plantations.
Sincerely
Frédéric Danjon
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