Screening of Some Egyptian Wheat Cultivars under Low Soil Moisture and Molecular Characterization Using Drought Specific Markers and DREB1 Gene Markers

Drought stress during seed germination may act as selection criteria for drought tolerance in wheat. An experiment was done at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) under a controlled condition to investigate germination of ten Egyptian wheat varieties under a stressful amount of water, and to verify for the presence of drought-resistant genes in the studied Egyptian cultivars using specific molecular markers for drought and DREB1 Gene markers. A sample from Nebraska soil was used to construct the moisture retention curve, and to select soil moisture stressful levels. Wheat cultivars showed different significant variations in the percentages of germination (p<0.01) as well as there were a significant effects of water stress treatments and days on germination (p<0.01. The most responsive Egyptian cultivars on the more stressful condition (7.5 ml) were Sids13 (18.33%) followed by Giza168 (16.66%). Among the Egyptian cultivars Giza168 and Sids12 showed the highest mean of germination responses (42.50%) to the two water treatments followed by Sids13 (40.83%). In the present study, 22 drought specific molecular markers were used to screen the ten wheat cultivars from Egypt. The PIC ranged from 0.00 to 0.90 with a mean PIC of 0.38. The generated Dendrogram revealed three main clusters. Cluster 1 contains three cultivars (Sids 12, Giza 168 and Wesley), cluster 2 includes three cultivars (Gemmiza 10, Gemmiza11 and Sakha 93) and cluster 3 contains (Misr1 and Misr2). Screening for dreb1 gene specific to dehydration responsive element binding protein's was made using four primers, results showed two primers (P18 and P22 primers) were approximately matched the expected band size products. This study may add valuable information for further wheat improvement programs and selection and hybridization for drought tolerance. Tolerant cultivars can be grown under rainfall condition in the north coastal region of Egypt.