Selection and screening of drought tolerant high yielding chickpea genotypes based on physio-biochemical indices and multi-environmental yield trials

Abstract

Background: Chickpea is one of the major legume crops being cultivated in the arid and semi-arid regions of Pakistan. It is mainly grown on the marginal areas where, terminal drought stress is one of the serious threats to its productivity. For defining the appropriate selection criteria for screening drought tolerant chickpea genotypes, present study was conducted. Distinct chickpea germplasm was collected from different pulses breeding institutes of Pakistan and evaluated for drought tolerance at germination and early seedling stages, furthermore, at late vegetative growth stages physiochemical traits and multi-environment yield performance were also tested. Results: Chickpea genotypes under different environments, were significantly varied for different seedling traits, physio-chemical attributes and seed yield. Genotypes showing drought tolerance by performing better at an early seedling stages were not correspondingly high yielding. Screening for drought tolerance on seed yield basis is the most appropriate trait to develop the drought tolerant as well as high yielding chickpea genotypes. Results confirmed that traits of early growth stages were not reflecting the drought tolerance at terminal growth stages and also did not confer high yielding. NIAB-rain fed environment proved ideal in nature to screen the chickpea genotypes whereas, NIAB-lysimeter and Kalur Kot was least effective for selecting genotypes with high seed yield. Genotypes D0091

A Comparative Study for Assessing the Drought-Tolerance of Chickpea Under Varying Natural Growth Environments

“…In Pakistan. several research articles have been published on the subject, e.g., Arshad et al (2003) , Bakhsh et al (2006) , Atta et al (2009) , and Shah et al (2020) .…”

Biochemical Profiling for Antioxidant and Therapeutic Potential of Pakistani Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Genetic Resource

“…The angles between the vectors and the distance of the genotypes from the origin of the biplot were used to extract important information. If the angle between two trait vectors is < 90 • then the correlation between the traits is positive, if the angle is > 90 • then traits show a negative correlation, while if the angle is equivalent to 90 • then traits show no dependency on each other (Shah et al, 2020). Based on the angle between the vectors, the biplot was categorized into four groups (A, B, C, and D).…”

Identification of Allelic Variation in Drought Responsive Dehydrin Gene Based on Sequence Similarity in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

“…Considerable variation exists for the morphological and physiological traits for drought resilience at the different developmental stages. Various studies have established several morpho-physiological parameters for the screening of the drought-like days to 50% flowering (DTF), maturity in days (DTM), relative water content (RWC), membrane stability index (MSI), yield components, etc (Bharadwaj et al, 2011 ; Maqbool et al, 2017 ; Shah et al, 2020 ). A rigorous phenotypic screening technique is required for a better understanding of the crop responses under the stress conditions.…”