Yield Stability of Different Elite Wheat Lines under Drought and Irrigated Environments using AMMI and GGE Biplots

Abstract

Wheat is the principal winter crop in Nepal. Drought affects 44% of the lands of the total wheat area in the country with a yield loss of 15–20%. This research focuses to minimize this loss through the identification of high-yielding lines stable across the drought stress and irrigated environments. The experiment was conducted in Alpha Lattice Design with 20 genotypes replicated twice with five blocks per replication from November 2019 to April 2020. The findings showed that genotypes, environments, and genotype-environment interaction have a highly significant effect on grain yield and explained 28.95%, 52.57%, and 18.47% of variation on yield, respectively. The which-won-where model revealed elite line NL 1420 is the most responsive line in the drought environment, followed by BL 4407, while elite line NL 1179 is the most stable line in irrigated environment. The mean vs stability model with principal component 1 and 2 explaining 65.76% and 34.24% respectively, showed that elite line NL 1420, BL 4407, BL 4919, Bhrikuti are both high yielding and stable lines while line NL 1179, Gautam, and NL 1384 are less stable in both test environments. Similarly, the ranking genotypes model indicated lines close to the ideal line are NL 1420, BL 4407, BL 4919, Bhrikuti as the most representative line for genotype evaluation. Thus, elite wheat line NL 1420 and NL 1179 are recommended as specifically adapted to drought and irrigated environments, respectively, and elite line NL 1420, BL 4407, BL 4919, Bhrikuti are recommended for further evaluation for stability.

Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 9(2): 98-106