Serine-mediated alleviation of chromium-induced phytotoxicity of two wheat cultivars: a multivariate and dose–response statistical assessment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54981/PDCA/vol5_iss1/a1
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Keywords:
chromium stress, Triticum aestivum, serine, three-way ANOVA, linear mixed-effects model, dose-response modelling, principal component analysis, MANOVAAbstract
Chromium (Cr) contamination can impair wheat growth and metabolism, while serine may modulate plant stress responses. This study analyzed a pot experiment with two wheat cultivars, Akbar-19 and Fakhar-e-Bhakkar, exposed to 0, 30, 60 and 90 ppm Cr, with or without serine co-application. Morphological and biochemical responses were evaluated using three-way ANOVA, linear mixed-effects models, four-parameter log-logistic dose-response models, principal component analysis (PCA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Chromium caused a clear dose-dependent decline in growth and biochemical traits. Significant Cr × Serine interactions for total chlorophyll, protein, proline and soluble sugar (p < 0.01) showed that mitigation by serine was not uniform across doses. Mixed-effects models confirmed significant negative associations between Cr dose and all tested responses (p < 0.01). In Akbar-19, serine shifted estimated EC50 values to higher concentrations for several endpoints, whereas patterns were less consistent in Fakhar-e-Bhakkar and some fits were poorly constrained. The first two PCA axes explained 74.7% of biochemical variation, and MANOVA detected significant effects of cultivar and Cr dose on the joint biochemical profile (p < 0.001). Overall, serine co-application was associated with partial, dose- and cultivar-dependent alleviation of Cr phytotoxicity rather than complete reversal. Because some higher-level analyses used reconstructed replicate data and the experiment lacked a serine-only treatment, these findings require confirmation with original replicate-level datasets.
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