Assessment of Drought Tolerance in Wheat genotypes for Sustainable Food Security and Breeding Programs

The crop which is widely consumed and utilized because of its social benefits and economic importance worldwide is wheat. In many parts of the world, it is generally consumed as feed and food for its nutritional benefits, and its productivity is uniform under different environmental effects. In a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replication, an experiment was conducted to assess 50 different wheat cultivars. These cultivars were evaluated under two distinct levels; normal (non-stressed) and drought (stressed) conditions. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) under non-stressed (normal) and stressed (drought) conditions of the examined traits showed highly significant differences which indicated the variation in the studied germplasm. The Genotypes that performed very well in both the normal and water deficit conditions are G12 followed by G8, G23, G20 and G16 while genotypes that performed poorly in both conditions were G35 followed by, G37, G47, G48 and G42 considered as drought susceptible genotypes. Attribute grain yield per plant disclosed the significant and positive correlation among all the studied traits under the non-stresses condition. Results revealed from principal component analysis (PCA), only 4 PCA showed the significant value under the both normal and stressed conditions because these PCAs exhibited eigenvalue more than one considered as significant. Under the normal condition, the PC1 indicated the 78.7% for the variance, PC2 indicated 14.6%, PC3 indicated 12.2% and PC4 indicated 10.1% as mention in Fig-4.7. In the drought condition, the PC1 represented for 74.5%, PC2 represented for 16.7%, PC3 represented for 11.6% and PC4 represented for 11.1%. The findings from this study will be valuable for both researchers anf farmers, as they can utilize the data to cultivate these specific genotypes for improved yield. Morever, the results can also be employed in future breeding aim to develop drought-resistant wheat genotypes, contributing to sustainable food security efforts.