13 Feb 2017
Conference Paper // The Agriculture-Nutrition-Health Nexus at the Cost of Water Availability in Maize Diverse Genotypes to Ensure Food Security
By Ijaz Rasool Noorka, Taufiqullah, J.S. (Pat) Heslop-Harrison and Trude Schwarzacher. The study is based on the health conservation of most important crop plant biodiversity under limited water supply to combat water stress condition prevailing speedily throughout the world creating food shortage. The main idea is to find suitable plant material which can be grown in arid environment by making sufficient crosses and checking the combining abilities to bear water stress in their life cycles.
The most versatile plant i.e. Maize is used by line × tester mating fashion to estimate general and specific combing ability in self and cross combinations of diverse maize genotypes under different water stress environment. Twelve parents genotypes comprising of eight lines and four testers were crossed to produce 32 F1 hybrids. In next crop season the parents along with their hybrids were evaluated with three water treatments in two seasons. Results showed the nature and magnitude of general and specific combining ability for grain yield and yield related traits like plant height, leaf area, number of kernels per row, ear length, ear diameter, grain yield per plant and harvest index. The significant estimates of GCA and SCA suggested the importance of both additive and non-additive gene actions for the expression of the traits which can help for the selection of parents to be used for the development of useful synthetics and hybrids resilient to contrasting water regimes.