Identification of Drought, Heat, and Combined Drought and Heat Tolerant Donors in Maize

By Jill E. Cairns, Jose Crossa, P. H. Zaidi, P. Grudloyma, C. Sánchez, Jose Luis Araus, S. Thaitad, D. Makumbi, Cosmos Magorokosho, M. Bänziger and 3 more. 2013

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low maize (Zea mays L.) yields and the impacts of climate change on maize production highlight the need to improve yields in eastern and south - ern Africa. Climate projections suggest higher temperatures within drought-prone areas. research in model species suggests that tol - erance to combined drought and heat stress is genetically distinct from tolerance to either stress alone, but this has not been confirmed in maize. In this study we evaluated 300 maize inbred lines testcrossed to CML539. Experiments were conducted under optimal conditions, reproduc - tive stage drought stress, heat stress, and com - bined drought and heat stress. Lines with high levels of tolerance to drought and combined drought and heat stress were identified. Signifi - cant genotype × trial interaction and very large plot residuals were observed; consequently, the repeatability of individual managed stress trials was low. Tolerance to combined drought and heat stress in maize was genetically dis - tinct from tolerance to individual stresses, and tolerance to either stress alone did not confer tolerance to combined drought and heat stress. This finding has major implications for maize drought breeding. Many current drought donors and key inbreds used in widely grown African hybrids were susceptible to drought stress at elevated temperatures. Several donors toler - ant to drought and combined drought and heat stress, notably La p osta Sequia C7-F64-2-6-2-2 and DTpYC9-F46-1-2-1-2, need to be incorpo - rated into maize breeding pipelines.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Genetics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9de0f364bd3a6e6a2fbd115c4f4b61199b8da947

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Agronomy and Crop Science

In Genetics

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Root traits contributing to plant productivity under drought (2013, background): “In maize, for example, plant performance under water-limited plus high temperature conditions was different than that under water-limited conditions alone (Cairns et al., 2013).”
Gains in Maize Genetic Improvement in Eastern and Southern Africa: II. CIMMYT Open-Pollinated Variety Breeding Pipeline (2017, background): “Drought is a recurrent feature within SSA agricultural areas (Rojas et al., 2011) and is a major cause of low yields and food insecurity (Cairns et al., 2013b).”
Integrated breeding approaches for improving drought and heat adaptation in chickpea ( Cicer arietinum L.) (2018, background): “Canci and Toker (2009) evaluated 377 chickpea accessions of chickpea for tolerance to combined drought and heat stresses by planting two months later than normal for the Antalya region (Turkey) to increase their exposure to drought and high‐temperature conditions.”
Crop modelling for integrated assessment of risk to food production from climate change (2015, background): “In other world regions, there are few incentives and considerable constraints for farmers to adapt crop management to warming trends (Cairns et al., 2013; Palosuo et al., 2013; Iizumi et al., 2014;Webber et al., 2014a).”
Gains in Maize Genetic Improvement in Eastern and Southern Africa: I. CIMMYT Hybrid Breeding Pipeline (2017, methodology): “Under low N stress, the top 10 testcrosses (crossed to the broadly adapted tester CML539) yielded at least 1 Mg ha−1 more than lines previously considered to be low-N tolerant (including CML504 and CZL02012) under severe low-N stress (Das et al., 2016).”