Effectiveness of Drought Tolerance Indices to Identify Tolerant Genotypes in Bread Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)
El-Rawy, M.A.; Hassan, M.I.
Journal of Crop Science and Biotechnology 17(4): 255-266
2014
ISSN/ISBN: 1975-9479 DOI: 10.1007/s12892-014-0080-7
Accession: 070461579
In order to assess efficiency of drought tolerance indices, 50 bread wheat genotypes were evaluated under three environments:normal (clay fertile soil, E1), 100% (E2), and 50% (E3) field water capacity in sandy calcareous soil. A total of 14 drought toleranceindices including grain yield/plant, grain yield/spike, 1000-kernel weight, spike length, no. of tillers, plant height, flowering time,stomata frequency, stomata width, stomata length, drought susceptibility index (DSI), stress tolerance index (STI), yield stabilityindex (YSI), and harmonic mean (HM) were estimated. A moderate to high broad-sense heritability was obtained for 1000-kernelweight (0.47), spike length (0.38), plant height (0.54), flowering time (0.73), stomata frequency (0.59), and stomata length (0.54).Grain yield/plant was strongly positively correlated with grain yield/spike, no. of tillers, plant height, flowering time, stomata length,STI, YSI, and HM, while negatively correlated with stomata frequency and DSI in E2 and E3, respectively. Thus, highly heritabletraits strongly correlated with grain yield under stress conditions especially stomata frequency and length could be used as reliableindices for selecting high-yielding genotypes tolerant to drought stress. Cluster analysis based on morpho-physiological traits suggestedthe group 3 genotypes in E2 as the most tolerant genotypes to be used for developing improved varieties