Study on relations between relative water content, cell membrane stability and duration of growth period with grain yield of lentil genotypesunder drought stress and non-stress conditions

Abstract

Drought is one of the most important abiotic stresses that limits crop production in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Lentil (Lens culinaris L.), a valuable legume crop, is produced mainly rain-fed in Iran. An experiment was conducted to study the relationships between relative water content (RWC), cell membrane stability (CMS) and duration of growth period with grain yield of 11 advanced genotypes, varieties and a local genotype in the Ardabil Agriculture and Natural Resources research Station. Experimental design was a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replication under both rain-fed and irrigated conditions. Combined ANOVA showed significant differences among all the evaluated traits. Significant differences between characters reveals that there are high variation between the traits studied. Means for characters under study showed that grain yield, RWC, CMS and duration of growth period decreased in rain-fed condition but cell membrane leakage (electric conductivity) increased. Correlation coefficients showed strongly positive relation between grain yield with RWC (r0.98**), strongly negative and non significant CMS (r-0.32ns) and strongly negative relation between grain yield and the days to maturity (r-0.78**). The results of the experiment also revealed that there weren’t a strong relation between yield and calculated attributes for drought tolerance except RWC. Therefore, this character could be effective in evaluation of drought tolerance and identification of high yielding genotypes (ILL 6031, ILL 9893 and ILL 8095).