Elicitation of potato plants to increase their resistance against Soft Rot Pectobacteriaceae bacteria

Abstract

The investigation aimed to assess three methods for inducing resistance in Solanum tuberosum L. (potato) plants against Soft Rot Pectobacteriaceae (SRP) bacteria. The approaches involved the incorporation of elicitors into the in vitro nutrient medium during plant cultivation, pre-planting of seeds soaked in water-containing elicitors, and irradiating in vitro cultivated potato plants with 21 kJ/m² of ultraviolet C light (UVC). The research validated the authors’ hypothesis, that the use of specific elicitors and UV-C light could induce resistance in potato plants against SRP bacteria, identifying the most effective elicitation technique for potato plants under experimental conditions. Two elicitors, specifically 50 μM salicylic acid and 250 μg/mL proline, were determined to be the most potent under experimental conditions. Supplementation of the Murashige and Skoog medium (MS) with 50 μM salicylic acid resulted in 21% of infected plants exhibiting no symptoms of infection on the 14th-day post-inoculation, and all plants treated with 10, 30, 35, 40, 45, or 50 μM of salicylic acid displayed a diminishing rate of infection progression. Plants growing with 25 µM SA were visually characterized by faster growth rates and higher vegetative mass relative to both control and test variants. Similarly, the incorporation of 250 μg/mL proline into the MS medium caused a response with 37.5% of plants showing no disease symptoms on the 14th day post-inoculation.