Morphological and Physiological Variation in Drought Tolerance of Wheat Landraces Originated from Southeast Türkiye

Abstract

Drought stress, which is the most important abiotic stress factor affecting arable land in the world, causes serious crop losses. These crop losses reach up to 70% in some agricultural plants. Understanding the complex drought stress response is very important to develop a strategy against this form of stress. Although some progress has been achieved with the previous studies, the desired targets have not been reached up to now. Therefore, using resistant varieties in environmental conditions has become a widely used strategy in combating drought stress today. In this study, a total of 23 cultivars (16-landraces and 7 modern wheat cultivars) were used. The aim of this study was to reveal the drought tolerance degrees of 16 landraces by comparing them to 7 modern wheat cultivars. For this purpose, 23 cultivars were exposed to drought stress for seven days by withholding watering. After that, stem length, MDA and proline content of cultivars were determined and compared. According to our results, MDA and proline contents of sensitive modern cultivars were found to be high, while tolerant cultivars were found to be low. It has also been determined that some of the landraces exhibit a similar profile to the cultivars known to be tolerant. Among these cultivars, especially 88, 90 and 108 cultivars have low MDA and proline content under stress, which may indicate that these cultivars are potentially drought tolerant.