Significant yield reduction in maize (Zea mays L.) is expected under rainfed areas in India due to climate change. The study aimed to identify genotypes with immense yield potential with good quality under moisture stress. Ten yellow kernel inbreds having a differential response to stress were used to generate forty five F1s with diallel mating design and evaluated under stress as well as irrigated condition at flowering at two locations, Anand and Derol. Soil moisture content reduced drastically up to 44% signifying enough stress, to carry out study. Genotypic mean exhibited 47.30% yield penalty under stress. This might be due to reduced rates of photosynthetic activity and unbalanced associations between plant hormones and biological processes under stress. Whereas, the grain quality attributes, protein, oil, starch and β-carotene content increased by 5.38%, 3.63%, 1.82% and 2.44% in F1s under stress in hybrids, respectively. ANOVA revealed preponderance of non-additive gene actions for days to 50% tasseling and silking, anthesis-silking interval, leaf rolling, grain yield, number of ears per plant, seed index, shelling percentage, protein, oil, starch and β-carotene content in seed. Hybrids with a good level of stress tolerance with less yield penalty involved at least one tolerant or moderately tolerant parent, although the hybrids with both the susceptible parents didn’t perform well for grain yield under stress. The overall study concluded that crosses, CM140 × IL111, IL101 × IL111 and IL103 × IL109 found promising for grain yield and β-carotene content under stress. Also, genotypes having shorter Anthesis-Silking Interval reported higher grain yield under stress.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a staple food for most of the world’s people. About, 122 RILs population derived from a cross Danteshwari × Dagad deshi was used to identify QTL for tillers number per plant and plant height. The normal frequency distribution was followed for both the traits tillers per plant and plant height. Correlation between tiller number and plant height was evaluated and shown significant negative correlation, which means that dwarf plant having more tiller as compare to tall plant. A total of four QTLs were identified for tillers per plant and two for plant height using QTL cartographer 2.5 on chromosomes 1 and 3, respectively. The “qTN1.1” and “qTN3.1” for tiller number per plant on chromosomes 1 and 3, respectively. The both QTLs for tillers number per plant “qTN1.1” and “qTN3.1” showed positive additive effect, means that alleles from the parent Danteshwari acted to increase the measured trait tiller number per plant. Two significant major QTLs, “qPH1.1” and “qPH1.2” also mapped for plant height on chromosomes 1, with very high phenotypic variance of 53.97 and 46.29%, respectively. The QTL, “qPH1.1” for plant height found between marker RM3825 and HvSSR1-87 exactly co-localized the “qTN1.1” of tillers number per plant on chromosome 1. Both the negatively correlated traits tightly linked and present on same loci, showing linkage drag. The “qTN1.1” and “qTN3.1” could be useful for the improvement of plant type by pyramiding via. marker-assisted selection as tiller number a key component of grain yield.