Indian Society of Genetics & Plant Breeding
Drought stress is the major constraint in cowpea grown
on stored soil moisture conditions especially during the
pod formation period. The long term sustainable and
environmentally desirable solution is development of new
varieties with drought tolerance. To generate information
on the effect of receding soil moisture on physiological
traits and yields would be helpful in identifying and
developing drought-tolerant cowpea genotypes. A field
experiment was conducted on 25 diverse genotypes of
cowpea at CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar. The
genotypes were grouped on the basis of flowering
initiation and the physiological observations were
recorded during the flowering stage. Highly significant
genotypic differences were detected between and within
the group for physiological traits, biomass, yield attributes
and seed yield. The early flowering genotypes (Group-I)
showed lower leaf water potential (LWP), higher leaf water
content (RWC), canopy temperature depression (CTD) and
photosynthetic rate (PN) compared to medium (Group-II)
and late (Group III) flowering genotypes. RWC and CTD
were significantly associated with seed yield. RWC was
also correlated with P
N Therefore, the traits RWC and CTD,
which are simple to measure, could be used for screening
cowpea germplasm for drought tolerance.
Keywords: Canopy temperature depression, cowpea, drought tolerance, relative water content
Year: 2008
Volume: 68
Issue: 4
Article DOI: N/A
Print ISSN: 0019-5200
Online ISSN: 0975-6906
K. D. Sharma and Ashok Kumar info_circle
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