Effect of Arbuscular Mycorrhiza Species on Growth and Physiological Characteristics of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Cultivars under Drought Stress

In order to investigate the effect of different mycorrhizal fungai species and drought stress levels on physiological characteristics of chickpea cultivars, a factorial experiment was conducted in a completely randomized design in the greenhouse of Kurdistan Agricultural and Natural Resources Research Center in 2020. Its factors include irrigation at three levels (optimal irrigation at field capacity, moderate stress, and severe stress), application of mycorrhizal fungus at four levels (mosseae, Simiglomus hoi, Rhizophagus irregularis, and no inoculation (control)) and chickpea cultivar at two levels (ILC-482 and Pirooz). Results show that irrigation level has had a significant effect on the evaluated traits. Thus, by decreasing the amount of available plant water, both dry weight and chlorophyll content drops. Catalase activity increases under severe stress, compared to moderate stress and lack of drought stress up to 37% and 71.9% in Pirooz cultivar and up to 69.4% and 82.6% in ILC-482 cultivar, respectively. In case of the latter, the highest peroxidase activity is observed in severe stress conditions, which almost doubled compared to non-stress treatment. The activity of peroxidase enzyme is affected by the use of mycorrhizal fungi so that plants inoculated with G. mosseae has had the highest and non-inoculation with mycorrhiza the lowest peroxidase activity. In severe stress, the lowest amount of malondialdehyde has been obtained using G. mosseae. Inoculation of chickpeas with mycorrhizal fungi can be considered as a way to improve growth in non-stress conditions and increase tolerance to drought stress conditions.