Assessment of agro-morphological variability of dry-season sorghum cultivars in Chad as novel sources of drought tolerance

Abstract

Dry-season sorghum is a type of sorghum whose establishment ends at the end of the rainy season and its development takes place during the dry and cold harmattan period. Its root system is particularly well developed with deep penetration for water withdrawal. This study was conducted to assess the level of genetic diversity present among dry-season sorghum in Chad’s Sudanese zone using phenotypic traits, and to identify new sources of drought tolerance that could be used in sorghum breeding programs. A high variability in qualitative traits was observed except for the botanical race which showed that all cultivars were of durra race. It was also observed that most cultivars had compact panicles (66.67%), mostly black glumes (66.67%), glume hairiness (58.33%) and did not have aristation (91.67%). Most qualitative traits showed a coefficient of variation of less than 30%, and the analysis of the variance showed that at 0.1% probability, there were significant differences between cultivars for all traits except botanical race. It was observed that the potential productivity of dry-season sorghum of this collection was strongly related to their staygreen characteristic; a trait of enormous importance in breeding for postflowering drought tolerance in sorghum. Plant height was highly heritable (91.9%), followed by the peduncle length (90.2%), panicle length (87.5%) and the internodes number (86.5%). Structuring of diversity separated the cultivars into four statistically distinct groups; with group 2 clustering cultivars with panicle productivity, early maturity and high staygreen, and other traits that contribute to the performance of cultivars. The findings will help to enhance the selection and production of dry-season sorghum in Chad and also provide alternative sources for staygreen introgression into the larger sorghum breeding community.

Characterization of semi-arid Chadian sweet sorghum accessions as potential sources for sugar and ethanol production

“…Generally, the 0.5 t ha −1 average grain yield production in this study was quite low compared to the average 1.0 t ha −1 observed in Chadian grain sorghums or 0.87 t ha −1 for dry-season grain sorghum in the same region 14 . According to 7 , sweet sorghum is characterized by reduced grain yield as compared to grain sorghum.…”

“…However, our study showed that some white midrib accessions were very juicy. The sweet sorghum accessions from the Sudanese zone were identified to be from the caudatum and bicolor race, unlike the dryseason sorghum which are from the durra race 14 . According to 28 , sweet sorghum belongs to bicolor, caudatum, durra and hybrid bicolor-guinea race.…”

Genetic variability and multivariate analyses in coloured sorghum landraces (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) of Tamil Nadu

“…The phenotypic and genotypic coefficient calculated for 12 quantitative traits were listed in table 2. The high GCV and PCV value was observed for plant height upto flag leaf, flower length with pedicle, time of panicle emergence (Subramanian et al 2019), total height (Naoura et al 2019;Subramanian et al 2019), panicle length without peduncle (Karadi and Kajjidoni, 2019;Naoura et al 2019), panicle branch length, panicle neck length (Naoura et al 2019), thousand grains weight (Mofokeng et al2019) and single plant yield (Swamy et al 2018;Subramanian et al 2019).…”

Estimating genetic variability among diverse lentil collections through novel multivariate techniques

“…It was also noted that hundred seed weight was low in 2019 as compared to 2018. Similar studies were also performed by various researchers to characterize and evaluate a wide range of crops including lentil 3,7,11,[14][15][16][17][18] .…”

“…Assessment of genetic diversity based on phenotypic markers has been conducted worldwide in the near past in lentil and other legumes 3,7,11,[14][15][16][17][18] .…”