Development and screening of cowpea recombinant inbred lines for seedling drought tolerance

Abstract

The use of multiple traits for drought study affirms the complexity of drought tolerance in cowpea. Despite the availability of several traits for drought tolerance evaluation, the rapid screening technique used by many scientists for seedling drought in wooden boxes is the simplest method for screening large populations. The objective of this study was to select drought tolerant cowpea recombinant lines developed from a drought tolerant and susceptible parent using the wooden box screening technique. Two hundred Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILS) an F 2 : 6 generation were used for the study. The parents were drought tolerant line crossed with susceptible line. Screening was done in wooden boxes and plants stressed for 4 weeks and in two sessions. Leaf wilting, relative water content, chlorophyll content during stress, and recovery from drought data were taken. Results from this study showed significant differences (p < 0.05) for relative chlorophyll content for the 4 weeks of water stress and relative water content taken on the second week of water stress for all 200 inbred lines, but no significant differences were observed for the parental checks. Relative water contents taken for RILS during water-stress ranged between 70-20% for drought tolerant and drought susceptible lines respectively. The parental lines used as checks both had relative water contents of 60%. Relative water content for the second experiment ranged between 74-22% for tolerant and susceptible RILS respectively. About 12 inbred lines consistently performed well for recovery, 13 RILS were susceptible. RILS that maintained a higher relative water and chlorophyll contents, with high proportion of survived seedlings were 11. Potential seedling drought tolerant RILS have been identified.

Genetic architecture of inducible and constitutive metabolic profile related to drought resistance in qingke (Tibetan hulless barley)

“…Wilting is the external manifestation of water potential in plants. It has been proved that leaf wilting is closely related to the plant drought resistance and can be an indicator for the evaluation of plant drought resistance ( Alidu et al, 2019 ; Ye et al., 2020 ), scores based on the leaf wilting were also used for genome-wide association analysis in biotic ( Paulino et al., 2021 ) or abiotic ( Ahmed et al., 2021 ) stress research. To assess the drought resistance of highland barley directly and accurately, the wilting rate of qingkes under drought stress was counted and divided into 0 to 4 grades.…”

Phenotyping diverse cowpea genotypes reveals shoot traits contributions to drought recovery

“…Our main aim was to identify seedling drought tolerant lines and genotypic components of the seedling responses to drought stress. The wooden box technique has been shown in previous studies to be useful for evaluating a large number of genotypes such as Recombinant inbred lines (RILs) and landraces (Agbicodo et al, 2009;Alidu et al, 2019;Cui et al, 2020;Ravelombola et al, 2018Ravelombola et al, , 2020Verbree et al, 2015).…”

Evaluation of Drought Tolerance in USDA Tomato Germplasm at Seedling Stage

“…Interestingly, some tomato accessions were shown to maintain slightly greater levels of chlorophyll content under drought stress as compared to others, indicating potential differences in drought tolerance among the accessions. Alidu et al and Cardoso et al [38,61] also reported moderately greater leaf chlorophyll content in drought-tolerant cowpea recombinant inbred line and tomato genotypes, respectively, subjected to dry conditions. Furthermore, the report by Monteoliva et al [58] indicates that plants exhibiting more elevated chlorophyll levels than their counterparts under optimal water availability conditions are anticipated to exhibit greater tolerance.…”