Molecular Characterization of Parents and Genetic Study in their Cross Combinations for Drought Tolerance in Barley under Irrigated and Water Stressed Conditions

Molecular Characterization of Parents and Genetic Study in their Cross Combinations for Drought Tolerance in Barley under Irrigated and Water Stressed Conditions

In pursuit of enhance the productivity along with drought tolerance level of barley cultivar, a generation means analysis of selected 10 cross combinations was conducted under two environments viz., irrigated (moisture non- stress) and rain fed (moisture stress) conditions in Rabi 2012-13 with aimed to estimate the nature and magnitude of gene action controlling the inheritance of drought tolerance, yield and its contributing traits. Before crossing program the degree of diversity of selected genotypes were tested using SSR markers for better outcome. Based ongeneration mean analysis, both additive and dominant types of gene effects were important for most of the traits studied. Moreover, dominance gene effects (h), in general were higher than additive gene effects (d) under both the conditions. In presence of epistasis, almost all the crosses showed duplicate type of gene interaction under both the irrigated and water deficit conditions. In such crosses, the selection should be mild in the earlier and intense in the later generations because it marks the progress through selection.As dominance gene effects (h) were in higher magnitude, it would be worthwhile to resort the methods which will exploit non-additive gene effect and take care of nonallelic interactions, such as, diallel selective mating or biparental mating in early segregating generations for the development of high yielding barley genotypes with desirable drought tolerance related traits. Dendrogram generated based on SSR marker reveals that 10 parents formed three major clusters in which second and third cluster further subdivided into two minor groups with 22 to 76 ranges of variation. Addition of this result before choosing the parents for genetic analysis of such complex traits could be more fruitful under breeding program for crop improvement..