Muhammad Ahsan Asghar

During my master degree, I worked on the combined effect of shade and drought stresses on soybean seedlings. I did the experiment in order to investigate the hypothesis that shade pretreatment enhanced drought resistance of soybean. The main finding of this study is that, shade enhanced drought resistance due to the biosynthesis of abscisic acid. This study reported that, ABA contents were significantly enhanced under shade at 12 hours. Moreover we found that shade had significantly up-regulated the expression of ABA biosynthetic (AAO3 and NCED3) and signaling genes (ABI4 and ABI5), suggesting that 12 hours of shade can enhance the ABA contents which are able to mitigate the drastic effects of drought stress.