Alleviation of soybean terminal drought by selected plant growth regulators

The low soil moisture condition under climate change has been growing phenomenon in arid and semi-arid agro-ecosystems. Keeping this in focus, a study on soybean was undertaken to assess alleviation effect of plant growth regulators under induced drought at SHUATS- prayagraj, India. The drought experiment was laid in complete randomized design (CRD) and results were statistically analysed. The experiments constitute with four plant growth regulators viz., salicylic acid (T₁) @ 50ppm, GA₃ (T₂) @100ppm kinetin (T₃) @500ppm, IAA (T₄) @0.1 mM and (T5)100M Msalicylic acid+100^M SNP as treatments to alleviate terminal drought. Among treatments, the foliar application of GA₃ @ 100 ppm has increased number of pods per plant, number of flowers per plant, and pod length significantly but (T₁) salicylic acid @ 50 ppm, has improved growth parameters viz., plant height (48.9cm), number of leaf/plant (26.6) and number of branch/plant (11.00), yield parameters viz., length of pod (3.8 cm), number of pods/plant (12.00), number of seed/pod (3.00), number of seed/plant (36.00) and 100 seed weight (12.04 g). The results indicate that foliar application of salicylic acid - 50ppm improved the flowering ((18.3)), yield (12.00 pods/plant), and biochemical parameters indicating alleviation effect.