If I am looking to identify drought tolerant wheat genotypes based on physical parameters like root density, what parameters I need to cosider? Is it good idea to do research on intact soil? or pot culture is appropriate.
Always measure plant water relations. RWC (leaf relative water content) is easiest and very reliable.
Dear Amit Prasad Timilsina
Direct selection for yield under drought conditions is usually hampered by low heritability. Therefore, breeders rely on secondary traits with higher heritabilities to improve drought tolerance in agricultural crops.First, it is to be decided whether the researcher wants to screen for drought avoidance or drought tolerance. Generally, drought avoidance traits have high heritability; therefore, selection response for such traits may be large. For avoidance traits, it will have to decided whether the researcher wants at first to concentrate on root traits or above ground traits. While for above-ground traits simple, reliable, fast, non-destructive and cost-effective methods that allow a high-throughput phenotyping are available, a bottleneck in drought research methods exists in the root zone, although there is evidence that roots are a key trait for superior drought avoidance. Still only few field screening techniques exist, and most root screening is restricted to young plants and artificial growth media that limit inference to field grown adult plants.
Article Drought Tolerance Mechanisms in Field Crops
As we are ultimately concerned with yield, the validation of secondary traits must be done under field condition.Regards,
Arbind
I suggest getting in touch with researchers in the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics: https://www.k-state.edu/wheat-innovation-lab/. They will have a lot to say on this, and networks of researchers to point you to.
It is recommendable to use the field experiment rather than use pot cultures as field observation are repeatable and pot cultures can offer vary from field results.
Before establishing a field environment efforts would be made to make the field soil environment a consistent one by getting the soil characters such as pH and salts and major secondary and micronutrients not limiting.
The drought environment is created by a rain shelter and the use of selective irrigation by drip irrigation responding to soil tensiometers is useful for creating levels and timing of the drougt stresses.
Once a standardized drought environment is established successfully the wide variability of genotypic variation can be evaluated as sources of the tolerance resistance and ability to recover.
Sources of adaptative responses can be cross pollinated and useful segregants can be identified.
Beside the experiment station approach farmer fields can be used for evaluatin g useful materials generated.
The physico-chemical properties of the soil directly affect water potential, water retention capacity and water uptake by plants. Before a field test, these parameters need to be standardized.
Dear Amit Prasad Timilsina
Please check this:
Article Analysis of Agricultural Drought, Rainfall, and Crop Yield R...
Good luck.
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