Cadmium is environmentally hazardous in addition to posing a serious threat to crops in the country. Dr Abdul Ghani, a PhD scholar, revealing this in his thesis said that the research was designed to determine the cadmium tolerance potential of a lot of mungbean varieties at three physiologically important growth stages.
At all stages, varieties revealed substantial differences for tolerance to increase levels of cadmium, as adjudged in terms of changes in foliar toxicity symptoms as chlorosis and necrosis and changes in growth in various growth attributes at seedling and vegetative stages and shoot and root length and their dry weight and number and area of leaf along with pod and seed characteristics at maturity.
Highlighting the research objectives, Dr Abdul Ghani said that elucidation of possible mechanisms of cadmium toxicity was an important objective of the research, which was met using the selected highly cadmium tolerant (NM-98) and sensitive (NM-98) varieties.
The determinations were made for change in growth, gas exchange, pigments and nutrients attributes at various growth stages. The cadmium toxicity effects were closely and adversely related in cadmium sensitive compared to tolerant variety.
The findings of this study revealed about 1.5-2.0 fold reduced NRA in the sensitive variety, which supports the view that greater NRA in the assimilation of available nitrate, among the other factors, is crucial for better seedling growth under cadmium toxicity. Dr Abdul Wahid in the department of Botany, UAF supervised this thesis.