Screening barley varieties tolerant to drought stress based on tolerant indices

Abstract

With regards to the importance of drought stress and genotype screening under stress conditions, the current study was conducted to evaluate barley varieties in response to drought stress and find the tolerant ones, along with the determination of the influential ratio of each yield component on grain yield under both conditions. Accordingly, 25 barley varieties were evaluated under two water regimes including 100% (normal condition) and 50% (drought stress) of field capacity. Cluster analysis grouped the genotypes into four and three clusters under normal and stressful conditions, respectively, indicating that drought might limit the phenotypic variability among the verities. Based on the feature selection, spike weight, leaf area, and grain number per spike under normal condition, and the number of fertile spikelets and grain number per spike under water deficit conditions were the most influential traits on grain yield which verifies the impact of drought on the relationship among the agronomic traits. The overall results of biplot showed that varieties Danesiah, Eram, and Yoosef, which had higher grain yield than average for both conditions, were suitable varieties in order to be screened for both normal and drought stress conditions. Finally, according to the results of correlation of tolerance indices with grain yield, stress tolerance index (STI), harmonic mean productivity (HMP), and mean productivity (MP) which showed high correlations with grain yield under both conditions can be introduced as proper indices for screening tolerance genotypes of barley.