Crop production worldwide is focus to increasing environmental limitations, particularly to drought due to its high degree of impact and wide distribution. Conventional breeding approaches are trying to improve abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants, which have had some improvement, but are restricted by the quantitative nature of the traits. Maize is an important cereal crop. It is used as raw material in food, medicine and textile industries for the manufacturing of corn oil, corn flakes, dextrose, textile dyes livestock and poultry. Drought seriously affects plant growth from seedling to maturity. Mutation also proved to be tremendously important for evaluating functions for individual drought tolerant genes due to the availability of knock-out mutants and its docility for genetic transformation. To produce hybrids it is needed to collect information about germplasm diversity, combining ability and heterotic pattern that is essential in maximizing the effectiveness of the breeding programs. It will be helpful in selection of genotypes with improved yield. When genes for resistance to a particular disease or stress cannot be found in the available gene pool then mutation induction is the best alternative. In this review, the response of plant to drought and mutation are described, the regulatory routes which allow plants to manage with drought are presented, and how the present information can be useful to obtain stress tolerant plants.
The present study was conducted to evaluate the genetic basis of yield related traits under drought conditions. A high heritability and genetic advance was found for plant height, 100-grain weight, grain rows per cob and grain yield per plant, suggesting that the selection of high yielding maize genotypes is possible through this approach. The high specific combining ability of W64SP, A495, A509 and A50-2 suggested that the pre-screening of inbred lines may be an efficient approach to develop higher yielding maize hybrids through heterosis breeding under drought. Keywords:Combining ability, drought, genetic advance, heritability, heterosis, Zea mays. INTRODUCTIONMaize (Zea mays) is an important cereal crop worldwide and is ranked third after wheat and rice for its nutritional quality and uses (Cassamon, 1999;Ali et al., 2014a;b). It is a monoecious and highly cross pollinated crop mostly used as food, feed, forage, green fuel (ethanol), vegetable oil and starch and is the backbone of the poultry feed industry. Maize grain constitutes about 9.74 % grain protein, 4.85 % grain oil, 9.44 % grain crude fibre, 71.97 % grain starch, and 11.77 % embryo, while fodder contains 22.98 % acid detergent fibre, 51.69 % neutral detergent fibre, 28.797 % fodder cellulose, 40.18 % fodder dry matter, 26.85 % fodder crude fibre, 10.35 % fodder crude protein and 9.09 % fodder moisture (Ali et al., 2014 b;c;Saif-ul-Malook et al., 2014a;b;c under maize cultivation with 30 % of the total produce in Pakistan. The major share belongs to Sindh and KPK with 56 % area and 63 % production, respectively. The average production of maize in Pakistan is 3672 kg/ha, which is very low compared to other countries (Anonymous, 2012(Anonymous, -2013.
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