Effect of elevated carbon-dioxide on plant growth, physiology, yield and seed quality of chickpea ( L.) in Indo-Gangetic plains.

In the present scenario of climate change with constantly increasing CO concentration, there is a risk of altered crop performance in terms of growth, yield, grain nutritional value and seed quality. Therefore, an experiment was conducted in open top chamber (OTCs) during 2017-18 and 2018-19 to assess the effect of elevated atmospheric carbondioxide (e[CO]) (600 ppm) on chickpea ( JG 14) crop growth, biomass accumulation, physiological function, seed yield and its quality in terms of germination and vigour. The e[CO] treatment increased the plant height, leaf and stem biomass over ambient CO (a[CO]) treatment. The e[CO] increased seed yield by 11-18% which was attributed to an increase in the number of pods (6-10%) and seeds plant (8-9%) over a[CO]. However, e[CO] reduced the seed protein (7%), total phenol (13%) and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (12%) and increased the starch (21%) and water uptake rate as compared to seeds harvested from a[CO] environment. Exposing chickpea plant to e[CO] treatment had no impact on germination and vigour of the harvested seeds. Also, the physical attributes, total soluble sugar and antioxidant enzymes activities of harvested seeds were comparable in a[CO] and e[CO] treatment. Hence, the experimental findings depict that e[CO] upto 600 ppm could add to the growth and productivity of chickpea in a sub-tropical climate with an implication on its nutritional quality of the produce.