Tiancheng Xu , Huiyuan Su , Yun Huang , Lijin Chen , Siyuan Lin , Ziwei Gao , Pengfei Liu , Wei Sun

Guangzhou Key Laboratory for Research and Development of Crop Germplasm Resources, College of Agriculture and Biology, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, Guangzhou, 510225, China
Author    Correspondence author
Maize Genomics and Genetics, 2022, Vol. 13, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/mgg.2022.13.0003
Received: 01 Mar., 2022    Accepted: 10 Mar., 2022    Published: 21 Mar., 2022

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Xu T.C., Su H.Y., Huang Y., Chen L.J., Lin S.Y., Gao Z.W., Liu P.F., and Sun W., 2022, Analysis of sweet corn varieties in response to cadmium stress at seedling stage, Maize Genomics and Genetics, 13(3): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/mgg.2022.13.0003)

In order to screen the sweet corn varieties with strong cadmium tolerance and explore the differences in response to cadmium stress, 12 sweet corn varieties mainly selected in South China were used to study the effects of cadmium treatment. The seedling grew in sand culture until they initiated three leaves in total with two leaves expanded and treated with cadmium ion (Cd²⁺) solution, and then phenotypic investigation of seedling height, main root length, total root number, fresh weight, dry weight, and SPAD value of the first leaf. The results showed that there were significant differences under cadmium tolerance to those sweet corn varieties with different genetic backgrounds, and most of the eight characters measured had significant correlations between cadmium tolerance indices. A comprehensive index obtained by principal component analysis can effectively evaluate the cadmium tolerance of different varieties of sweet corn, and its contribution rate is 73.42%. Cluster analysis was used to classify 12 sweet corn varieties into sensitive (one variety), intermediate (eight varieties) and tolerant (three varieties). Among them, three varieties including ‘Zhongxiantian 102’, ‘Zhuyutian 1’ and ‘Fotian 10’ had strong cadmium tolerance, which could be further screened for low-cadmium-accumulating varieties to be used in agricultural production. At the same time, by comparing and analyzing the phenotypic variation between two varieties with different response to cadmium stress, it was found that cadmium stress would break the stability of chlorophyll in the leaves of sensitive sweet corn seedlings, affecting photosynthesis, and then reducing the accumulation of biomass and inhibiting growth and development. This study provides reference for further analysis of cadmium-resistant response mechanism of sweet corn.

Cadmium stress; Cadmium tolerance index; Variety; Seedling; Sweet corn