Breeding strategy for wheat improvement based on exploitation of varietal responsiveness towards phosphorus levels A proposed method

Abstract

Fifteen commercially released varieties of bread wheat were grown in 48 artificially created micro-environments. The varieties were evaluated for diversity and similarity for adaptive reactions towards different levels of fertilizers over a range of practically feasible environments following correlation method. Eighteen pairs of wheat varieties were found diverse with respect to their response pattern towards environmental variation and therefore, the genotypes of each pair could be crossed with each other in order to obtain improved genotypes. Only four pairs of wheat varieties (CPAN 1676, HD 2285; UP2113; HD2329; PBW 34, C 235 and PBW 34, HD 2204) exhibited isoresponsiveness over the same series of environments.