Indian Society of Genetics & Plant Breeding
Rapid productivity increases has not been realized in winter/
post-rainy/rabi sorghum, an important food crop in the
semi-arid tropical regions of India.The crop is dominated
with varieties as poor seed set due to susceptibility to cold
stress is noticed in the hybrids. Hence, before initiation of
breeding program to bring in tolerance to cold stress,
diverse group of breeding material that included 8 varieties,
7 maintainer lines, 5 restorer lines and a hybrid were
screened for tolerance to cold stress in two dates of sowing
for pollen viability and germinability apart from other
agronomic traits. Date of sowing significantly influenced
pollen germinability and the influence of the cooler night
temperatures was more than the genetic background. In
contrast, pollen viability had less phenotypic plasticity and
highly heritable.The loss of grain yield (open panicle grain
yield-selfed panicle grain yield) was about 5g/panicle in
varieties while it was 1.9g/panicle in restorer lines and about
5.7g/panicle in B-lines.The loss in grain yield was highest
in the hybrid at about 22.9g. Higher grain yields can be
attained in the hybrid with improvement in the pollen
viability and germinability. The germinability percentage
was positively associated with selfed panicle weight, grain
yield and harvest index while the viability percentage did
not show such association.The germinability percentage
was more linearly related in R lines followed by B lines and
varieties.
Keywords: Sorghum, cold stress, pollen viability, seed set
Year: 2014
Volume: 74
Issue: 4
Article DOI: 10.5958/0975-6906.2014.00868.2
Print ISSN: 0019-5200
Online ISSN: 0975-6906
P. Sanjana Reddy*, J. V. Patil and T. Phani Krishna info_circle
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