HERITABILITY OF SALT TOLERANCE DURING GERMINATION AND EMERGENCE IN SHORT STAPLE COTTON (GOSSYPIUM HIRSUTUM L.).

• Main Author: LEDBETTER, CRAIG ALLEN.
• Other Authors: Dobrenz, Albert
• Language: en
• Published: The University of Arizona. 1986
• Subjects: Plants > Effect of salt on.; Cotton.; Salt-tolerant crops.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/183961

Soil salinity is a serious problem for farmers in irrigated agriculture. Soil salts cause reduced stands and yields because of toxic ion and osmotic problems for surviving seedlings. The tolerance to sodium chloride during germination and emergence was studied in three commercial cultivars of short staple cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.). It is this stage of the life cycle that cotton is most sensitive to salts in the soil solution. The objectives of this study were to increase the tolerance to sodium chloride during germination and emergence and to determine the narrow sense heritability of this factor. Parental cultivars initially demonstrated 15% emergence at -1.2 MPa NaCl. Surviving salt tolerant plants were planted in the field and seeds from these plants were used as the germplasm for the next cycle of salt tolerance selection. Experiments were conducted to determine the relative salt tolerance of all plants at -1.2, -1.4, -1.6, and -1.8 MPa NaCl. Emergence of salt tolerant accessions from the first cycle of selection ranged from 3.1 to 25.8% in the first relative salt tolerance experiment. The average emergence of all accessions taken over all four salinity levels was 8.9% for first cycle plants. After a second cycle of selection for salt tolerance, the average emergence percentage increased to 13.0% over the four salinity levels. Emergence ranged from 0.7 to 32.6% in the second relative salt tolerance experiment. Narrow sense heritability of sodium chloride tolerance during germination and emergence was estimated at 0.38 using data from the first and second relative salt tolerance experiments.