Potential Application of Selenium and Copper Nanoparticles in Improving Growth, Quality, and Physiological Characteristics of Strawberry under Drought Stress

Abstract

Drought stress can reduce strawberry yield and quality and is one of the main abiotic factors restricting strawberry production in China. Nano-agricultural technology has significant regulatory effects in improving crop yield and quality and reducing agricultural environmental pollution. We performed a pot experiment using FenYu No. 1 strawberry and applied copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) and selenium NPs (SeNPs) to study their effects on the growth, quality, photosynthetic parameter indexes, and physiological characteristics of strawberry plants under drought stress. The growth and photosynthesis of strawberry plants were significant adversely affected by moderate drought stress (DS, 60% field capacity (FC)) and severe drought stress (SS, 25% FC). Compared with normal water-holding conditions, the application of CuNPs, SeNPs, and their combination effectively increased the agronomic traits of strawberry plants; improved fruit quality; and enhanced the content of photosynthetic pigments (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, and total chlorophyll), photosynthetic characteristic parameters, chlorophyll fluorescence parameters, and water-use efficiency. In addition, the exogenous application of CuNPs and SeNPs improved the drought tolerance of plants by increasing the activities of antioxidant enzymes catalase, peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase, and decreasing the malondialdehyde content, with the following overall trend among the treatments: control < CuNPs < SeNPs < CuNPs + SeNPs. The results of the principal component analysis showed that the two extracted principal components could reflect 85.54% of the information of the original data, leaf photosynthetic pigments, photosynthetic characteristic parameters, chlorophyll fluorescence parameters, and strawberry agronomic traits indexes and could be used as the primary indexes for evaluating the improvement of strawberry growth by nanofertilizers under drought-stress conditions. Taken together, our results indicate that nanofertilizers have potential for improving the growth, quality, and physiological characteristics of strawberries under drought stress.