Evaluation of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) genotypes using drought susceptible and tolerance efficiency indices under irrigated and drought stress environment

Abstract

Drought stress is one of the foremost severe abiotic stresses responsible for drastic reduction in wheat production under arid and semi-arid environments. Breeding for drought tolerance is very confounded by an inability to create defined, precise and repeatable stress conditions and inadequacy of an efficient, reproducible screening technique. Therefore, the present investigation was laid out to screening of twenty advance wheat lines for drought stress in RBD with two replications under Irrigated) and drought conditions during rabi, 2019–20 at Wheat Research Station, Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University, Vijapur, India. Phenotyping was performed for 11 morphological and four physiological traits distinctively. The analysis of variance revealed that component of variance for genotypes was significant for all traits, revealed the presence of enough genetic variability in the material under studied. Based on per se performance revealed that genotypes GW 511, VL 967, GW 11 and GW 512 produced higher grain yield compared to other genotypes in both irrigated and drought conditions. Genotype DBW-154 followed by GW-510 and GW-506 recorded lowest value of drought susceptible index (DSI) and highest value of drought tolerance efficiency (DTE), indicating potentiality to produce with minor yield losses under drought conditions in comparison to normal conditions. Grain yield and its related traits viz., grains per spike, 1000 grain weight and grain weight per spike exhibited moderate to high heritability and expected genetic advance as percent of mean under both stress and non stress condition and these traits could be considered as suitable selection criteria for the development of high yielding bread wheat varieties. Under irrigated condition grain yield showed strong positive association with tillers, 1000 grain weight and biomass yield, similarly in drought condition biomass yield showed strong correlation with grain yield, followed by NDVI II, grain weight/spike, 1000 grain weight, tillers and grains/spike. Under stress CT-II was negatively correlated with GW/SPK (−0.631), biomass yield (0.611), grain yield (−0.423) and 1000 grain weight (−0.345), indicating genotypes has canopy cooling ability to produced higher grain yield, biomass, TGW and GW/SPK under drought stress. So, these traits should be consideration while selection under drought stress and select the drought tolerance genotypes with superior performance, this can be potentially used in future for improvement of bread wheat yield and yield related traits against the drought.