Morphologically accessing wheat genotypes in response to drought on early stages of development
Rebeca Catanio Fernandes, Victoria Freitas de Oliveira, Luciana Dallegrave Schroeder, Alice Pereira de Jesus, Carlos Busanello, Mateus Ferreira Santos, Vívian Ebeling Viana, Antonio Costa de Oliveira and Camila Pegoraro
Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Pelotas, RS, Brasil
Abstract
As an alternative to decrease the internal deficit of wheat production in Brazil is the expansion of the cultivation area to the Cerrado, in which the occurrence of drought periods is common, causing damage when it occurs during the crop establishment and during the reproductive stage, thus develop genotypes tolerant to dry environments is essential. Development of drought-tolerant genotypes depends on the presence of genetic variability, thus the identify the variability within the accessions cultivated in Brazil allows the selection of genotypes with tolerance levels for use in crossing blocks. Thus, the objective of this study was to identify wheat genotypes displaying drought tolerance in the early stages of development through morphological characterization. In this sense, here we investigate 104 wheat genotypes cultivated in Brazil in response to drought at early stage of development. The seeds were deposited on germination paper with water and with PEG6000 at -0.5 MPa solution, simulating the control and drought stress conditions, respectively, and were kept in a germination chamber for eight days. The number of roots, root and shoot length, and root and shoot dry mass were measured, and a relative performance was calculated. The results were subjected to analysis of variance, Scoot Knott test and a Pearson correlation. The genetic distance was calculated based on the Euclidean distance and for the grouping the UPGMA method was applied. The principal component analysis was also performed. Based on the shoot and root phenotyping, it was possible to verify that the evaluated wheat panel displayed genetic variability associated with drought and present potential genotypes to drought tolerance on early stages of development, as FPS Nitron, which is a target genotype as a genitor to be used in crossing blocks aiming drought tolerance.
Highlighted Conclusions
1. The wheat genotypes growing in Brazil present genetic diversity in response to drought stress at early developmental stages.
2. FPS Nitron was less affected in drought stress condition which suggest its inclusion in crossing blocks.
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