Breeding for Drought Tolerance in Maize (<i>Zea mays</i> L.)

Abstract

Drought, like many other environmental stresses, has adverse effects on crop yield including maize (Zea mays L.). Low water availability is one of the major causes for maize yield reductions affecting the majority of the farmed regions around the world. Therefore, the development of drought-tolerant lines becomes increasingly more important. In maize, a major effect of water stress is a delay in silking, resulting in an increase in the anthesis-silking interval, which is an important cause of yield failures. Diverse strategies are used by breeding programs to improve drought tolerance. Conventional breeding has improved the drought tolerance of temperate maize hybrids and the use of managed drought environments, accurate phenotyping, and the identification and deployment of secondary traits has been effective in improving the drought tolerance of tropical maize populations and hybrids as well. The contribution of molecular biology will be potential to identify key genes involved in metabolic pathways related to the stress response. Functional genomics, reverse and forward genetics, and comparative genomics are all being deployed with a view to achieving these goals. However, a multidisciplinary approach, which ties together breeding, physiology and molecular genetics, can bring a synergistic understanding to the response of maize to water deficit and improve the breeding efficiency.

Heterotic Effect of Different Cytoplasmic Combinations in Sunflower Hybrids Cultivated Under Diverse Irrigation Regimes

“…The wild relatives of crop plants were evolved in wild environments independent of the pressure by human selection [24]. Therefore, they are the storehouse of valuable genes for traits like drought resistance, and employing the useful genes from wild relatives of the crop has resulted in the development of drought-tolerant genotypes in several crops like maize and eggplant [25][26][27][28]. Similarly, the wild relatives of sunflower were used in the past [29][30][31].…”

Can Genetic Progress for Drought Tolerance in Popcorn Be Achieved by Indirect Selection?

“…Several studies deal with correlations and GE interaction between maize traits evaluated with and without drought stress [11,[31][32][33][34], however, no scientific papers were found reporting similar results for popcorn. In general, the values of CV g were higher than the estimates of CV e in both water conditions (Table 1).…”

Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Maize QTLs Associated With Grain Yield, Flowering Date and Plant Height Under Drought Conditions

“…Maize (Zea mays L.) is the third most important cereal in the world after wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and rice (Orzya sativa L., Golam et al, 2011). The continued rise in world human population and consequent food demands against the backdrop of worsening global climate change has prompted greater need for the crop (Xu et al, 2014;Maazou et al, 2016). However, as a result of the continuing climate change phenomenon, drought stress will remain the primary environmental limitation to maize productivity (Rao et al, 2016).…”