Abstract
Maize is the most important crop plant that provides food for human consumption. With increasing temperature due to global climate changes, the availability of water in soil declines and is considered as a major threat to crop plants. Thus, the development of drought tolerant varieties is pre-requisite to cope with the water shortage situation. In this study, we analyzed the response of two maize varieties (Azam and Baber) to drought stress using antioxidant system. The imposition of drought for 7 days resulted in decrease in fresh weight of leaf and total proteins. ROS such as H2O2 were strongly accumulated whereas MDA level was also increased indicating the ROS based lipid peroxidation under drought stress. With the increase in the level of H2O2, antioxidant enzymes such as APX, CAT, SOD and POD also showed significant increase as compared to the control leaves. Thus, the tested maize varieties responds to drought with enhanced enzymatic activities of the defense mechanism to cope with the elevated level of ROS and can be considered as drought tolerant based on possession of well established antioxidant system.
