SCREENING OF LENTIL (LENS CULINARIS MEDIK.) GENOTYPES FOR DROUGHT TOLERANCE AT SEEDLING STAGE UNDER DIFFERENT LEVELS OF DROUGHT STRESS

Abstract

Water stress is one of the major issue around the world which highly influence on plant development and become the reason of loss in crop yield. Lentil is an important legume crop which suffer from insufficient soil moisture. Eight genotypes of lentil under three different concentration of drought were considered a drought tolerant genotype against drought stress. The results showed that morphological traits such as RL, FW, shoot length (SL), plant height and wilt weight act significantly different in different concentration of water. The lentil genotypes 8 and 3 are proved as tolerant against drought out of all genotypes. The investigation results reveals that lentil-8 perform well in all parameters except root length that was better in lentil- 5. The maximum plant height (7.93 cm) recorded in Lentil-1, dry weight (2.41 g), turgid weight (2.31 g), chlorophyll content (27.47 nm), canopy temperature (15.48 °C) recorded in letil-8, shoot length (7.98 cm) & fresh weight (3.68 g) recorded in lentil-3 and maximum root length (26.83 cm) recorded in lentil-5. The minimum plant height (6 cm), shoot length (6.73 cm) recorded in lentil-7, root length (21.41 cm) recorded in lentil-8, fresh weight (1.82 g) recorded in lentil-5, wilt weight (1.38 g) recorded in lentil-1.