Evaluating wheat genotypes for drought tolerance through phenotypic and genotypic analyses

Abstract

At the phenotypic and genotypic levels, differences in resistance to drought stress, a significant grain output limitation on the world's wheat production, were found. Research priorities include developing high-yielding, drought-tolerant wheat varieties, particularly in areas where climate change is expected to increase the frequency of drought conditions. Grain yield, a complicated, late-stage characteristic influenced by several variables other than drought, is frequently the foundation for selection in breeding for drought tolerance. An experiment was conducted to investigate the response of 40 wheat genotypes at maturity stage under two environments (Normal and Drought) by using Randomized Completely Block Design (RCBD). In current study, the results of Analysis of Variance depicted that all the attributes had significant variations among studied genotypes under both normal and stressed conditions. Correlation analysis mentioned under normal condition all traits showed highly significant association among all of them except spikelet’s per spike in genotypic and phenotypic correlation. In D1 condition, all indices also exhibited same trend except spike length in genotypic and phenotypic correlation while in D2 grain length had non-significant association with spikelet’s per spike and grain width had non-significant relation with spike length in phenotypic condition. The heritability and genetic advance percentage had high heritability in D1 condition while all traits showed moderate genetic advance percentage in all the conditions. According to these findings, in areas where drought is a common occurrence, screening for genotypes that are tolerant of drought would be a more practical way to reduce the negative impacts of drought on wheat.