Department of Crop Physiology, College of Agriculture, Dharwad
* Part of the M. Sc. thesis of the senior author submitted to University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore
A pot culture experiment was carried out to study the effect of short term water stress on free proline accumulation, relative water content (RWC) and potassium (K+) content in different plant parts of three cotton genotypes, viz., Jaydhar, Bhagya and DCH-337. In all the genotypes stem showed higher accumulation of free proline under stress followed by leaf and root. Among the ganotypes, Bhagya accumulated more proline in absolute quantities but with regard to number of times increase during stress, it was more in DCH-337, indicating its tolerance to drought. Relative water content and potassium content differed among genotypes. Variety Jaydhar showed lesser reduction in RWC especially in stem and maintained high level of K+ even after alleviation of stress. Among the genotypes tested DCH-337 was found to be superior by maintaining higher proline even after alleviation of stress.
