As a part of series of webinars planned by the ICAR- Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore; the institute hosted a webinar on “Phenotyping strategies for screening of drought tolerance in soybean” on 10th June 2021 with the involvement of about 40 participants which included progressive farmers, as well as agricultural scientists, plant breeders and researchers working in the ICAR institutes and AICRP centres. The audience represented various states across the country like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and major soybean growing states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and other Northern states.

While discussing the subject, Satpute said that the soybean crop at present is suffering on account of heavy yield losses as well as quality due to frequent unpredicted dry spells, once in every five years, in current era of changed climate scenario. Increasing soybean productivity, targeting breeding for yield per se, is challenging as productivity of released and new soybean varieties gets stagnated under such situation.

He said that drought tolerance in soybean is governed by a complex set of traits thereby posing various challenges for the breeders to develop climate resilient varieties. To do this, use of novel phenotyping based breeding strategies hold the promise to increase genetic gain during varietal development. The Novel phenotyping based breeding strategies involve multi-parent hybridization, chemical desiccation based generation advancement, multi-tier screening for drought related traits etc. The ICAR-Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore has initiated work for development as well as identification of new germplasm and parental lines for drought related traits.