The application of a treated sugar beet waste residue to soil modifies the responses of mycorrhizal and non mycorrhizal lettuce plants to drought stress

Positive effects of sugar beet (SB) application on soil properties and performance of several woody shrub legumes have been described under heavy metal stress and in diverse degraded environments, especially when combined with arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM). However, information on the combined effect of SB amendments and AM symbiosis in horticultural crop plants under drought stress is scarce. Thus, the main objective of this work was to determine if the combination of treated SB waste and AM fungi results in improved drought tolerance of an horticultural food crop such as lettuce and whether or not the effects observed are linked to enhanced antioxidant activities and regulation of two stress-related genes. Lettuce plants inoculated or not with Glomus intraradices and grown on soil amended or not with a treated SB waste were cultivated under well-watered conditions or subjected to drought stress. Plant growth, expression of two drought responsive genes encoding for Delta(1)-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthetase and 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase, oxidative damage to lipids and the activity of four antioxidant enzymes were measured. Results showed that the application of treated SB waste resulted negative for the development of AM and nonAM plants (both under well-watered and under drought stress conditions). This effect can not be ascribed to the impairment of specific plant antioxidant defenses. In contrast, a lack of induction of a gene from the ABA biosynthetic pathway was observed in SB-treated plants, which could have contributed to the low performance of these plants. The positive effects of combined application of treated SB waste as amendment and AM fungi have not been shown for a horticultural food crop such as Lactuca sativa. Thus, before starting a program aimed at the utilization of different amendments based on transformed wastes, basic studies on functional and physiological compatibility between the plant and the amendment are necessary.