Evaluation of Recombinant Pure Lines of Lentil under Drought Stress

Lentil with high protein (up to 28%), low price and good taste, have a very important role in the human diet and known as one of the most important plants in in semi-arid and dry regions. So it seems necessary to identifing the varieties that are drought tolerant. In order to identifying drought tolerant lines in 168 recombinant pure lines derived from crosses between Hindi variety of L3685 (High yield, stand-up habit and early maturity) as the female parent and Iranian variety of Qazvin (sleeping growth habit and late maturity) as male parents, an experiment was conducted in a Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications under normal and drought stress conditions at experimental field of Shahrekord University in 2013-14. The results of combined analysis revealed that the differences between lines were significant in all studied traits except seed diameter (P≤0.01). The differences between normal and stress conditions and also interaction of line × stress were significant for all traits except day to flowering and seed diameter. Drought stress had the maximum effect on pod weight, seed yield and pod number and reduced them 54%, 45.3% and 42.25%, respectively, compared to the normal condition. 160, 125, 48, 129 and 103 Lines were identified as superior in terms of seed yield, biological yield, days to flowering nd pod number per plant. Correlation analysis revealed that the relationship between yield with biological yield, pod number per plant and pod weight per plant was significantly positive in two conditions, while its correlation with days to maturity was significantly negative. Stepwise regression in both environments for seed yield, showed the important and determining role of biological yield and days to maturity. The results of present study showed that identification of the high-yielding lines in normal and stress conditions and drought tolerant lines is possible. The biological yield, days to maturity, number of pods and weight per plant are very important to selection for high grain yield.