Transgenerational Seed Exposure to Elevated CO₂ Involves Stress Memory Regulation at Metabolic Levels to Confer...

Drought is the worst environmental stress constraint that inflicts heavy losses to global food production, such as wheat. The metabolic responses of seeds produced overtransgenerational exposure to e[CO₂] to recover drought's effects on wheat are still unexplored. Seeds were produced constantly for four generations (F1 to F4) under ambient CO₂ (a[CO₂], 400 μmol L^-1) and elevated CO₂ (e[CO₂], 800 μmol L^-1) concentrations, and then further regrown under natural CO₂ conditions to investigate their effects on the stress memory metabolic processes liable for increasing drought resistance in the next generation (F5). At the anthesis stage, plants were subjected to normal (100% FC, field capacity) and drought stress (60% FC) conditions. Under drought stress, plants of transgenerational e[CO₂] exposed seeds showed markedly increased superoxide dismutase (16%), catalase (24%), peroxidase (9%), total antioxidants (14%), and proline (35%) levels that helped the plants to sustain normal growth through scavenging of hydrogen peroxide (11%) and malondialdehyde (26%). The carbohydrate metabolic enzymes such as aldolase (36%), phosphoglucomutase (12%), UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (25%), vacuolar invertase (33%), glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (68%), and cell wall invertase (17%) were decreased significantly; however, transgenerational seeds produced under e[CO₂] showed a considerable increase in their activities in drought-stressed wheat plants. Moreover, transgenerational e[CO₂] exposed seeds under drought stress caused a marked increase in leaf Ψ_w (15%), chlorophyll a (19%), chlorophyll b (8%), carotenoids (12%), grain spike (16%), hundred grain weight (19%), and grain yield (10%). Hence, transgenerational seeds exposed to e[CO₂] upregulate the drought recovery metabolic processes to improve the grain yield of wheat under drought stress conditions.