Interactions between Yield and Associated Traits of Tropical Maize Hybrids under Non-Drought and Drought Stress Environments

Abstract

Yield is one of the most important component in breeding program and it depends on the relationship between plant traits. Twenty (20) hybrids of tropical maize were evaluated to investigate the relation between various traits and yield at the research and development farm of the faculty of Agriculture, Nasarawa State University Keffi, Nigeria. Two environment were used for this experiment which include 2021 for non-stress and 2022 for stressed and the experiment was laid out in a complete randomized block design with three replications. The result showed significant difference among the studied traits exception for Days to anthesis, Days to maturity, Protein content and Days maturity for stress and non-stressed respectively. Correlation analysis suggest that there is a perfect relationship between Days to silking and Days to anthesis (0.98) for non-stress and a moderate relationship (0.55) under stressed environment while there is a moderate negative correlation between Days to silking and Protein content (0.52) for stress condition.