Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agronomy, Vol. LXIII, Issue 1
Written by Elena PETCU, Liliana VASILESCU, Elena PARTAL
Drought tolerance of plants as a complex character, makes the choice of physiologycal traits, selection methods and breeding to be are very difficult. Breeding of barley (and not only) focused on higher production under water stress, which led to relatively good progress. Now, however, when a so-called 'plateau' of production has been reached, the focus is on the search for those secondary features that can ensure further progress. Root phenotyping is as important as shoot phenotyping, because plant’s ability to uptake moisture and nutrients mainly depends on root architecture. Therefore, root phenotyping is important for crop breeding, although under field conditions, screening roots by phenotyping is a very difficult task. Our previous research shows that in case of winter wheat for most of Romania and for regions with similar conditions, winter wheat breeding should aim at creating mainly cultivars with large seminal roots angle that could better use rainfall falling during the vegetation season, but also cultivars with a small seminal roots angle that can improve the access to water in the soil depth profile during severe drought conditions. In this study we evaluated the root system architectural traits for several Romanian barley genotypes and association with yield. Our results shown that the angle of seminal roots varied from about 44° in cultivar F-8-3-01 to more than 120º in some inbreed lines. Will be discussed if breeding new barley cultivars with efficient root systems carries great potential to enhance resource use efficiency and plant adaptation to unstable climate from Romania.
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