SCREENING OF THERMOTOLERANT GROUNDNUT GENOTYPES USING TEMPERATURE INDUCTION RESPONSE – A NOVEL APPROACH TO ASSESS GENETIC VARIABILITY

Author(s): K. Rekha Rani, K. Chamundeswari and R. Usha*

Abstract: Plants are exposed to different external conditions that affect growth, development, and productivity. Heat stress due to high ambient temperature is a serious threat to crop production worldwide. Groundnut is an important oil and food crop cultivated in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. In the present study, temperature induction response (TIR) was carried out for screening the groundnut genotypes, where the seedlings were exposed to sublethal temperature from 38 oC -54oC for 5 hours followed by lethal temperature at 58 oC for 3 hours. Among the 20 diverse genotypes screened, 4 showed tolerance to high temperature with mean percent seedling survival of 97.5%, 6 showed moderate tolerance and 10 were identified as temperature susceptible compared with control (100% survival). There was considerable variation among the genotypes screened for acquired thermotolerance. Results suggested that TIR is a simple and powerful technique and can be used to screen large population at seedling stage to identify thermotolerant lines.

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