Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Horticulture Environment and Biotechnology, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Plants, which can be simultaneously exposed to multiple stressors in their environment, have regulatory mechanisms to sense and rapidly adapt to stress conditions. In this study, physiological, biochemical and molecular changes in tomato exposed to drought and UV-B were determined. The results obtained are important for the development of breeding and control strategies against yield losses caused by stress factors in plants. Although stress factors suppressed plant height, low doses (5% Polyethylene glycol (PEG) and 1 h UV-B) had a hormesis effect and promoted plant height. Biochemical and molecular analyses selected the 20% PEG + 180 min UV-B dose, which caused a 47.2% height retardation of the plants, while maintaining physiological functions. Malondialdehyde levels, which is an indicator of membrane damage, also increased as a result of stress treatments. Antioxidant gene activities (lySOD, lyPOD, CAT and lyGPX) were mostly induced by UV-B stress. Stress factors significantly reduced genomic template stability. The lowest Genomic Template Stability (GTS) % was 67.1% in the drought and UV-B stress groups, followed by the UV-B and PEG treated groups with 75.6% and 80.7%, respectively. lyPARP1 and lyBARD1 gene expressions were overexpressed in the UV-B treated groups, whereas the same situation occurred for lyKU70 gene expression in the drought group. HSP21 and HSP90 gene expression was highest in the drought groups. All aquaporin genes (SlPIP1;1, SlPIP1;3, SlPIP1;7) were overexpressed with drought treatment. The highest increase in ERF1 and LEA gene expression, which are drought stress genes, was observed in drought, the WRKY70 gene was increased in UV-B, and DREB reached its highest levels in the drought + UV-B combination. In the heat map analysis, the strongest vector forces were determined as aquaporins, lySOD, lyPOD for drought stress, chlorophyll degradation gene CHlase, antioxidant lySOD, DNA damage repair gene lyPARP1 for UV-B stress. In the combination of drought and UV-B, lyHSP70, lySGR1 vectors were found to be the most efficient vectors. The results of the holistic analysis showed that single and combined stress treatment had a significant regulatory effect on the stress-related gene expressions used in our study.