17 Usman Saleem Naeem Akhtar Salman Saleem Sadia Kaukab Muhammad Yaseen Hafiz Muhammad Asadullah Ijaz ul Hassan Journal of Animal and Plant Sciences JAPS 20242024/03/31 34 2 415-424 1018-7081 https://doi.org/10.36899/JAPS.2024.2.0727 <p style="text-align: justify;">Maize being the leading cereals grain crop is widely used throughout the world including Pakistan. About thirty three percent of world's arable land experiences deficiency of water and greatest harvest yields are frequently decreased by dry spell. The current research was considered to examine the genetic traits governing the drought tolerance of morphological and physiological parameters during the seedling stage. The breeding stock consisted of two parental lines, YP12 and US-17 with divergent traits with respect to their ability to bear water shortage and their succeeding generations F₁ and F₂ along with back crosses BC₁ and BC₂ were utilized as experimental material._&nbsp;The combined analysis of variance for all traits with respect to parents (P₁ and P₂) and their fundamental generations (F₁, F₂, BC₁ and BC₂) yielded significant differences among generations and water treatments suggesting the presence of wide range of genetic variability. Relative water contents, leaf water potential, osmotic potential and turgor potential decreased under water stress environment. All morphological parameters like root and shoot length, fresh root and shoot weight and dry root and shoot weight exhibited a decrease in response to water stress. Dry shoot weight, turgor potential and osmotic potential under water stress has additive nature suggesting that early selection based on one of these traits may also compliment the other resulting in development of better yielding maize material for stress tolerance. Further, root characters such as root length, fresh and dry weight can play a crucial role in efficiently evaluating the maize genotypes to drought stress during the seedling stage.</p> Epistasis, Dominance, Genetic basis, Maize, Drought tolerance Pakistan Agricultural Scientists Forum https://thejaps.org.pk/AbstractView.aspx?mid=2023-JAPS-1168