Abstract
Drought stress is now become the most important abiotic stress for wheat in Bangladesh. Rabi season often compromised wheat production by imposing drought stress. Therefore, it has been a priority to develop drought tolerant wheat variety for Bangladesh. However, the lack of genetic variability for drought tolerance in wheat has been a major bottleneck for developing drought tolerance wheat variety. The present investigation was carried out in an aim to evaluate several exotic and locally cultivated wheat genotypes for drought tolerance based on morpho-physiological and biochemical traits. Experiment was carried out at the net house of Field Laboratory of Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh with seven replications in a RCBD design. Ten locally cultivated and exotic wheat genotypes were grown under control (100% field capacity) and drought (30% field capacity) conditions. Genotypes used in the study were identified with different types of drought tolerance mechanisms, viz., Berkut for earliness, Shatabdi for grain weight, BARI Gom 26 for spike and grain number, along with Vorobey, Berkut for enhanced biosynthesis of proline, Sokoll for undamaged leaf Chlorophyll content and relative water content, Sakha8, Gaurav, Sonalika and Shatabdi for membrane thermostability; Sakha8 and Sourav for improved stress tolerance index. The genotypes screened out with different traits related to drought tolerance can be utilized as gene source for future breeding programs.
Highlights
Drought is a major stress that compromise crop yield around the world (Reddy et al, 2004)
Certain biochemicals are found synthesized in stressed condition to confer drought tolerance by providing osmo-regulation, like, proline (Pospíšilová and Batková, 2004), abscisic acid (ABA) (Quarrie et al, 1999) as well as some drought induced physiological traits (Reynolds et al, 2007)
The yield related traits along with biochemical and physiological diagnosis can be of better aids to distinguish between drought stress susceptible and poor yielded drought tolerant wheat lines towards utilizing the genetic sources
Summary
Drought is a major stress that compromise crop yield around the world (Reddy et al, 2004). Developing drought tolerant crop variety (e.g. wheat) for Rabi season has been, a major objective for the breeder for last few decades in Bangladesh (Siddiqui et al, 1999; 2000). Majority of the attempts of improving drought tolerant wheat cultivars were based on the emphasized evaluation of yield contributing morphological characters (Hossain and Teixeira Da Silva, 2012; Siddiqui et al, 1999; 2000; Rahman et al, 2009; Hakim et al, 2012), with less emphasis for biochemical and physiological traits. The genotypes screened with above mentioned morphological, physiological and biochemical traits can be used as parents for synthesizing drought tolerant wheat genetic stocks towards developing drought tolerant wheat variety. The present investigation was, aimed to evaluate several locally cultivated and exotic wheat genotypes for drought tolerance based on morphological, physiological and biochemical traits that are known to confer drought tolerance in wheat
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