BACKGROUND AND AIMS Certain lines of wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) are more tolerant of salinity than others. The physiological basis of this difference is examined in a comparative study of a saline-tolerant and saline-intolerant line that emphasizes plant water relations. METHODOLOGY Effects of salt-treatment (75 mM maximum) extending from a few hours to 3 weeks were quantified in 8-day-...

An enduring question in plant physiology and evolution is how single genotypes of plants optimize performance in diverse, often highly variable, environments. We grew 35 natural accessions of the grass Brachypodium distachyon in four environments in the glasshouse, contrasting soil water deficit, elevated temperature and their interaction. We modeled treatment, genotype and interactive effects ...

Resources such as water taken up by plants can be released into soils through hydraulic redistribution and can also be translocated by clonal integration within a plant clonal network. We hypothesized that the resources from one (donor) microsite could be translocated within a clonal network, released into different (recipient) microsites and subsequently used by neighbor plants in the recipien...

Soil microorganisms, such as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), play crucial roles in plant growth, but their influence on plant water relations remains poorly explored. We studied the effects of native soil microorganisms and inoculation with the PGPR strain Aur6 of Pseudomonas fluorescens on water stress responses of seedlings of the drought-avoiding Pinus halepensis Mill. and the d...

The interesting species-specific relationship between maximum daily shrinkage (MDS) and stem water potential (stem) was investigated in order to understand the mechanisms involved. Vulnerability curves of Vitis, Citrus, Olea and Prunus were analysed and the air entry stem in the xylem (Pe) was calculated. The water relations parameters of the living tissue of the bark were also studied by bui...