Effects of Shading on Growth, Development and Physiological Characteristics of Starchy Sweet Potato
Artificial shading treatments were adopted to study the effects of yield,starch content,above-groundtraitsand physiology characteristics under three shade conditions (0,30%,70%) to investigate the response of starchy sweet potato to different light intensity.The results showed that,the leaf length,leaf width,petiole,distance between leaves and vine increased,but the stem diameter and the yield of fresh root,dry root and starch decreased with the increase of the degree of shade.In addition,the chlorophyll content,peroxidation (POD) activity,catalase (CAT) activity,MDA and proline content also increased while superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and chlorophyll a/b ratio decreased in the leaves.As compared with CK,the starchy sweet potato variety "Guijingshu2" still grew well under 30% shading but was greatly affected by 70% shading on many negative effects such as aboveground partsovergrowth,stress resistance weakened,dry matter accumulation deficiency and both yield and quality reductions by weak light stress.Therefore,the way to realize high-yielding and high-efficient cropping patterns in intercropping was using reasonable field arrangement.