The abiotic stresses such as temperature, drought and salinity and unusual warming trends during growth stage are causing yield and quality decline. Drought has been identified as a major threat restricting crop production worldwide. Drought or water deficit stress elicits many different physiological responses in plants. Hence, there are intensive efforts to improve plant tolerance to drought and other environmental stressors. The use of elicitors such as salicylic acid (SA) and KNO3 is an emerging novel practice to improve the yield and quality of crops as they play an important role in the regulation of various physiological and metabolic processes. The objective of this research was to study the effect of the foliar application of SA and KNO3 on the quality of tomato fruits under water stress condition. A completely randomized experimental design with 3 replications was used. The experiment comprised of ten treatments of different concentrations of Salicylic Acid and KNO3 along with one stress check treatment and stress free check treatment. Treatments were applied at pre flowering stage and 50% fruiting stage through foliar sprays after transplantation. The response variables were fruit quality parameters (fruit length, fruit diameter, fruit weight, total soluble solids, and Ascorbic Acid content). The obtained results suggest that the foliar spraying of SA and KNO3 improves the biosynthesis of phyto-chemical compounds in tomato fruits, compared to control plants. According to the results, it is advisable to use the dose of 100 PPM of SA since it has a higher content of bioactive compounds which gives highest quality outputs in stress condition without compromising yield. We suggest salicylic acid might be considered as a potential growth regulator to improve tomato plant drought stress resistance, in the current era of global climate change.

Salicylic Acid, KNO3, elicitors, Phyto-chemical compounds

The tomato (Solanum lycsopersicum L.) is one of the most important vegetables in the world due to its nutritional, economic, and social values; it is particularly important in human nutrition due to its antioxidant properties (Stoleru et al., 2020). Environmental stress, such as water limitation, adversely influence the quality attributes of Tomato. In this predicament, plants, alone, can’t mitigate the damaging effects. Therefore, Tomato plants need exogenous support to cope drought stress which is facilitated by the osmo-protectants such as Salicylic Acid to carry out various process of osmo-protection to enhance yield and quality. Based on the results of the study, it can be said that Tomato variety BT-10 responded favourably in terms of quality-attributing traits. In terms of quality attributing features, the treatment combination T5 (100 ppm S.A) showed higher performance in water stress condition. So, Salicylic Acid can be considered as an important source that can improve various quality parameters under water stress conditions resulting in higher yield and ultimately the higher return.

Deeptimayee Sahoo, Dipika Sahoo, Gouri Shankar Sahu, Pradyumna Tripathy, Swarnalata Das and Rajkumari Bhol (2022). Assessment of Salicylic Acid and KNO3 impacts on quality parameters of Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) under water stress condition. Biological Forum – An International Journal, 14(4a): 833-839.