Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) presents many similar responses to drought and salinity, two water stress factors

The current trend of climate change revived researchers’ interest in the study of exacerbated abiotic constraints that hamper crop production, such as drought and salinity. Although they are distinct stress factors, both drought and salinity result in water stress for plants. Water stress is an environmental constraint that threatens crop production in many regions of the planet. Counterintuitively, drought or lack of sufficient water in the plant root environment is not the sole cause of water stress, which also results from the difficulty for the plant to take-up water due to salinity. However, it is not clear whether plants respond likewise to drought-induced and salinity-induced water stress. Therefore, comparing these two sources of water stress was necessary to understand how groundnuts respond and what tolerance mechanisms are deployed to cope with them. To this end, we have drawn on scientific publications from journals indexed in Scopus, DOAJ, AGRIS, Web of Science, etc., to gather relevant information about the effects of drought and salinity on the physiological, biochemical and molecular responses of groundnut. The present review thus examined (a) the responses of groundnut to drought, (b) the responses of groundnut to salinity, and (c) the synthesis highlighting the similarities and differences between these two responses.