Pyraclostrobin can mitigate salinity stress in tomato crop

Processing tomato is a widespread crop in the Mediterranean area where often there are problems of high salinity of irrigation water with considerable harmful effects on yield. Pyraclostrobin is a strobilurin based fungicide (PBF) having a broad range of applications. Strobilurins are reported to have biostimulant effect on plant mitigating abiotic stress. Therefore, the objective of this work was to investigate the ability of PBF to improve gas exchange parameters, chlorophyll, activity of antioxidative enzymes as superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), catalase (CAT), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), yield characteristics, and water use efficiency (WUE) of tomato under salinity.