a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Nakanwagi, Mildred JulianSseremba, GodfreyNahamya, Pamela KabodMasanza, MichaelKizito, Elizabeth Balyejusa2020-01-242021-12-212020-01-242021-12-212020-01-21Nakanwagi, M.J., Sseremba, G., Kabod, N.P. et al. Identification of growth stage-specific watering thresholds for drought screening in Solanum aethiopicum Shum. Sci Rep 10, 862 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58035-12045-2322 (online)https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58035-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/856This research article was published in Scientific Reports by Nature Research. It is available via DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58035-1Effective phenotyping for drought resistance is a pre-requisite for identification of modest crop varieties for farmers. For neglected and underutilized crops such as Solanum aethiopicum Shum group, no drought screening protocol based on rigorous iterations has been documented. A split-plot nested treatment structure was arranged in an experiment to identify growth stage-specific watering thresholds for this crop. Three plant growth stages (main plot; seedling, vegetative and flowering), watering regime at plant growth stage (2 regimes; well-watered and drought stressed) and day since last watering at plant growth stage were evaluated for soil moisture content (SMC), leaf wilting score (LWS), number of green leaves per plant (LPP) and leaf blade width (LBW). Highly significant differences (p < 0.001) were found at the different plant growth stages, watering regime (WR) within plant growth stage, and day within WR and plant growth stage. Under drought stress treatment, SMC declined exponentially at each stage. The earliest leaf wilting, reduction in LPP and LBW were generally observed at flowering followed by vegetative and slowest at the seedling stage. For future effective drought phenotyping studies in S. aethiopicum Shum and related crops, we recommend setting minimum drought stress treatments below 18% SMC at which the LWS is ≥2 at the vegetativeenAttribution 3.0 United Stateshttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/us/Solanum aethiopicum ShumBitter tomato - Drought resistanceAfrican eggplant - Drought resistanceVegetables - Sub-saharan Africa - Drought resistanceResearch Article