Author(s):

Sanam Kumari, Shailesh Kumar, Pravin Prakash and AK Singh

Abstract: Most of the wheat growing areas of the world experience environmental stresses including drought (moisture stress) and high temperature (heat stress) that adversely affect crop growth, development and yield. Water-deficit often combined with high temperature stress is the main abiotic factor limiting crop growth and development. Present investigation was performed to see the growth response of different wheat genotypes under individual and combined stress conditions. Growth parameters like dry mass accumulation, fresh weight, root length & shoot length per plant and physiological traits (chlorophyll contents measured in terms of SPAD units), were recorded in 10 days old wheat seedling. Results showed genotypic difference exist among wheat genotypes in response to combined stress, genotype KO-307 was severely affected however C-306 was least affected by combined stress. Under combined drought + high temperature stress condition decrease in chlorophyll (12.72%), plant dry mass (26.09%), fresh weight (21.93%), root length (10.91%) and shoot length (14.41%) were observed compared with the optimum condition and when averaged across genotypes. Overall, combined effect of drought + high temperature stress was more detrimental than the individual stress, however, the interaction effect was hypo-additive in nature, which might be due to cross adaptation effect.

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