Assessment of drought tolerance of sesame germplasm with agronomic and quality traits

Abstract Sesame ( Sesamum indicum L.) is a summer crop and its production is threatened by drought stress (WS) due to increased aridity and higher temperature worldwide. Breeding sesame accessions that are more tolerant to WS is therefore highly important for sustainable seed production. Here, 21 accessions representing 12 sesame‐growing countries were evaluated with yield and quality traits under two different water‐regime treatments as non‐stressed (NS) and WS. The combined analysis of variance revealed that there was a significant variation among the accessions for all agronomic traits. We also found that the effects of treatment and genotype were significant for the quality traits of oil content, stearic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid. The t ‐test of significance for mean values indicated that there were significant differences between the treatments for plant height, number of branches, number of capsules, and seed yield. The highest yield was found in PI 170735 with the value of 25.6 g/plant in the treatment of WS. The higher values were observed for oil content in NS treatment, the highest amount of oil content was recorded as 53.9% for PI 207664. In addition, higher grand mean was observed for oleic acid under WS treatment. Principal component analysis using the five agronomic traits indicated that 76.60% and 71.18% variability accounted for the first two principal components (PCs) with eigen values ≥ 1 in WS and NS treatments, respectively. The diverse accessions characterized with agro‐quality traits can be used in further improvement programs to develop new drought‐tolerant cultivars.