GRAFTING: A RAPID AND SUSTAINABLE TOOL TO MITIGATE ABIOTIC STRESSES IN VEGETABLE CROPS

Abstract

Of late, grafting has emerged as an effective tool in successful vegetables production, though it is in practice for centuries in woody perennial crops, by exploiting its potentials primarily to tackle the issues prevailing under intensive vegetables production system such as soil pests/ pathogens. However, recent researches have demonstrated that the adverse effects of certain abiotic stresses (moisture stress, thermal stress, salinity, alkalinity, heavy metals) on shoots of commercial improved cultivars could also be effectively minimized by grafting them onto suitable hardy rootstock genotypes. Using grafted transplants in fruiting vegetables (tomato, brinjal, pepper, cucumber, muskmelon and watermelon) has become common practice in many parts of the world, with being more popular in East Asia and Western world (Europe, U.S. and Middle East) for both greenhouse as well as open field vegetables cultivation. However, in India is still in infancy stage, despite being a number of environmental factors cause significant losses in vegetable production. Particularly, arid and semi-arid regions, where vegetables production suffer from limited water availability, prevalence of salinity in soil and water, and toxic elements in contaminated soils and sewage irrigating water, etc. Hence, there is immense potential to increase the vegetables production under such constraint conditions by exploiting the benefit of grafting. In fact, grafting enables joining the attributes of two dissimilar plants into one, which means the inherent resistance of resistant/ hardy rootstock (for drought, salinity etc.) could be provided to the susceptible commercial scion cultivar by way of grafting. Moreover, despite several adversity arid and semi-arid regions hold good wealth in terms of biodiversity of vegetables species, especially in cucurbitaceous species. Many lines collected from this regions are documented for specific traits including for drought and salinity stress and fruit quality (sweetness and shelf life), besides various diseases. These need to be exploited as potential rootstock materials to improve the commercial one through grafting.