Pedigree Selection in Bread Wheat Under Water Deficit for Yield in Toshka Conditions

Abstract

The water treatments were 100 and 67% of the irrigation requirements of wheat in Toshka as normal and drought condition, respectively. A transgressive segregation in both populations for all studied traits inducted the suitability of those material for pedigree selections. The genetic advanced for grain yield/plant and its components were greater in population 2 than in population 1 in the first cycle in pedigree selection. Highly significant differences among the selected families for all the studies traits were observed in both populations under normal and drought conditions. After one cycles of selection, the broad sense heritability was very high for most traits and reached 77.79 and 92.02% for grain yield/plant under normal irrigation, while were 87.53 and 93.12% under drought stress in population 1 and population 2, respectively. Two cycles of pedigree selection for grain yield/plant was enough to detect the best families and could be performed in the early segregating generations. It could be concluded that single trait selection was efficient to improve the selection criteria in these populations. These genotypes could be sources for drought tolerance.