Conventional and Molecular Improvement of Maize for Drought Tolerance
Abstract
Maize is an important staple crop for food, feed, bioenergy and industrial products globally. Despite the importance of maize as a principal food crop in developing countries, drought is a major constraint that affects maize production, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where maize is grown under rainfed conditions. Plant breeders have been striving to improve and develop drought-tolerant variety. Nevertheless, these efforts still cannot meet the demand for food security due to fast population growth and climatic change. Conventional maize breeding for drought tolerance follows diverse approach includes recurrent selection, backcrossing, pedigree breeding, and subsequently evaluating inbred lines and hybrids at optimum conditions, managed screening site and random stress across multiple environments. Molecular markers were used to select donor parents with drought-adaptive alleles and then integrated into elite maize lines to create a new population of drought-tolerant maize inbred lines and subsequently used to develop hybrids maize tolerance to drought stress.
Key words: Secondary traits, molecular markers, drought -adaptive alleles, maize
DOI: 10.7176/JBAH/15-2-04
Publication date: July 30th 2025

To list your conference here. Please contact the administrator of this platform.
Paper submission email: JBAH@iiste.org
ISSN (Paper)2224-3208 ISSN (Online)2225-093X
Please add our address "contact@iiste.org" into your email contact list.
This journal follows ISO 9001 management standard and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Copyright © www.iiste.org