Assessment of some seedling traits associated with drought tolerance in Triticum and Aegilops species of wheat

Wheat is the most important widely cultivated crops in the world. Its yield is greatly influenced by both biotic and abiotic stresses. Therefore, an evaluation of different species belonging to Triticum and Aegilops species for seedling traits was attempted. All the traits i.e. root length, shoot length and coleoptile length showed high heritability in broad sense and root length showed significantly positive correlation with coleoptile length under both moisture non- stress (E1) and moisture stress (E2) environments. All the traits showed a decreasing trend under moisture stress conditions in all the species and the reduction for all the traits were more pronounced in wild species than the cultivated species.