Abstract
Globally, water stress is the major abiotic stress, which contributes huge in yield losses of major crops including maize. To
breed for drought tolerance, the first and foremost step is to search resistance at genotypic level among genetically diverse
maize germplasm on the basis of most reliable traits. To find out the best responsible and reliable traits, the responses of 60
maize accessions under three different moisture levels at seedling against different standards were examined following
triplicated completely randomized design. Principal component analysis and level of association among studied parameters
were computed to mark most relevant standards to tolerance and susceptibility. The accessions were grouped in to different
categories on the basis of their performances. On the basis of different evaluation standards, the accessions 19191, 15233,
15155 and 14927 were identified as drought tolerant while the accessions 15035, 14880, 15188 and 24685 were observed as
drought sensitive. Selected accessions may be used as contrasting parents for the development of drought tolerant hybrids in
the next breeding program. Principal component analysis and graphical representation of the traits indicated that root length,
shoot length, root fresh weight, shoot fresh weight, root dry weight, cell membrane thermo-stability and leaf temperature were
verified as very important variables linked to drought stress. This study is helpful for the identification of selection criterion
linked to drought tolerance in maize to be used in further selection and breeding programs.
