Details for Phenotyping pearl millet for adaptation to drought

Vadez V, Hash T, Bidinger FR and Kholova J (2012). Phenotyping pearl millet for adaptation to drought. Frontiers in Plant Physiology 3:386. (DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2012.00386).

Pearl millet is highly resilient to some of the driest areas of the world, like the Sahel area or fringes of the Thar desert in India. Despite this, there is a wealth of variation in pearl millet genotypes for their adaptation to drought and the object of this paper was to review some related work in the past 25 years to harness these capacities toward the breeding of better adapted cultivars. Work on short duration cultivars has been a major effort. Pearl millet has also some development plasticity thanks to a high tillering ability, which allows compensating for possible drought-related failure of the main culm under intermittent drought. The development of molecular tools for breeding has made great progress in the last 10–15 years and markers, maps, EST libraries, BACs are now available and a number of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for different traits, including drought, have been identified. Most of the work on drought has focused on the drought tolerance index (DTI), an index that reflect the genetic differences in drought adaptation that are independent of flowering time and yield potential.

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