Abstract
Several rye growing regions of Central Europe suffered from severe drought stress in the last decade. Rye is typically grown on sandy soils with low water-holding capacity in areas with low rainfall, thus drought-tolerant varieties are urgently needed. The main objective of our study was to evaluate the drought stress tolerance of rye hybrids using large-scaled field experiments. Two biparental populations (Pop-A, Pop-B) each consisting of 220 F2:4 lines from the Petkus gene pool and their parents were evaluated for grain yield testcross performance under irrigated (I) and rainfed (R) regime in six environments. We observed for most environments severe drought stress leading to an average grain yield reduction of 23.8 % for rainfed compared to irrigated regime in drought stress environments. A decomposition of the variance revealed significant (P < 0.01) genotypic and genotype × environment interaction variances but only a minor effect of drought stress on the ranking of the genotypes with regard to grain yield. In conclusion, separate breeding programs for drought-tolerant genotypes are not superior to the currently practiced selection under rainfed conditions without irrigation in hybrid rye breeding in Central Europe.
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Acknowledgments
This project was financially supported by the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumers Protection (BMELV, Bonn) via the Agency for Renewable Resources (FNR, Gülzow, Grant number 22013004). M. Gowda was supported by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Bonn) within the HYWHEAT project (Grant ID: FKZ0315945D). The authors like to thank the teams at KWS LOCHOW GMBH and Universität Hohenheim for their excellent technical assistance in data collection.
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Communicated by F. Ordon.
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122_2012_1994_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplementary material 1 Sketch of the field design in one replicate; the numbers represent arbitrary entry numbers to illustrate genotype allocation, red rectangles refer to pairs of plots being used for estimating genotype x irrigation interaction within one replicate (PDF 54 kb)
122_2012_1994_MOESM3_ESM.pdf
Supplementary material 3 Principal coordinate analysis of Pop-A and Pop-B tested in Wohlde (WOH), Petkus (PET) and Walewice (WAL) and two years (‘10/’11) in irrigated (I) and rainfed (R) regime. The numbers in parentheses of the axes refer to the percentage of variance explained by the principal coordinate (PDF 132 kb)
122_2012_1994_MOESM5_ESM.pdf
Supplementary material 5 Relative partitioning of variance components (genotypic, σ 2G ; genotypic x environment interaction, σ 2GxE ; genotype x environment x irrigation interaction, σ 2GxExI ; genotype x irrigation interaction, σ 2GxI ; pooled error, σ 2e ) for grain yield of irrigated (I), rainfed (R) and across irrigated and rainfed (I+R) regimes averaged across three environments for Pop-A and four environments for Pop-B with significant genotype x irrigation interaction variance (PDF 54 kb)
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Hübner, M., Wilde, P., Schmiedchen, B. et al. Hybrid rye performance under natural drought stress in Europe. Theor Appl Genet 126, 475–482 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-012-1994-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-012-1994-4