Exogenous Application of Silicon Can Help Augment Drought Tolerance in Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) by Enhancing Morpho-physiological and Antioxidant Potential

Abstract Drought stress is considered one of the most severe stresses, which can result in devastating yield reduction in agriculture crops. There are many approaches recommended by the researchers and adopted by the farmers to minimize the devastating effect of drought. However, exogenous application of growth regulators in combination to plant nutrients is the innovative attitude to ameliorate the shocking effects of drought stress. So we planned a study to investigate the ameliorative effect of exogenously applied potassium silicate wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) crop under water deficit conditions. The current study was conducted at the Agronomic Research Farm area, Faculty of Agriculture and Environment, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur. RCBD-Split plot design with four repeats was used. The treatments consist on “T0” (Control), “T1” (exogenous application of potassium silicate @ 1% solution), “T2” (exogenous application of potassium silicate @ 2% solution), “T3” (exogenous application of potassium silicate @ 3% solution). The results of our study revealed that drought stress can significantly affect crop yield as a result of the reduction in chlorophyll-a (1.07), chlorophyll-b (0.49), total chlorophyll contents (1.62), flag leaf area (38.33 cm2), plant height (100.17cm), number of nodes per plant (3.91), tiller height (92.42), number of tillers m− 2 (191.17), spike length (7.58 cm), number of spikes per plant (10.25), number of grains per spike (25.08), 1000-grain weight (36.66g), total dry weight per plant (309.75g), biomass yield (23424kg/ha) and grain yield (4564.2 kg/ha). On the other hand, the exogenous application of potassium silicate at 2% solution showed promising results in terms of ameliorating the drought effect by significantly enhancing chlorophyll-a (1.21), chlorophyll-b (0.64), total chlorophyll contents (1.92), flag leaf area(45.25 cm2), plant height (123.50cm), number of nodes per plant (5.25), tiller height (99.42), number of tillers m− 2 (276.26), spike length (12.92cm), number of spikes per plant (14.25), number of grains per spike (38.33), 1000-grain weight (44.33g), total dry weight per plant (385.00g), biomass yield (24000 kg/ha) and grain yield (5074.8kg/ha). These findings led us to conclude that the exogenous application of potassium silicate has a great ability to compensate for the detrimental effects of drought in wheat crops.