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Wheat is a staple food and one of the major sources of energy, protein and fiber in human diet. Presently, the production level in wheat in India has reached a plateau.
The conventional breeding methods provide at best only 1% yield gain/year against the much-needed 2% yield consistently over the year.
In order to break the present yield plateau, a new innovative approach like exploitation of heterosis through the development of hybrid wheat is an effective way to achieve another yield jump and achieve our target of 109 million tons of wheat by 2020. Although hybrid technology has paid rich dividends, successful exploitation of hybrid vigor on a commercial scale is still awaited in wheat.
Efforts to induce male sterility in wheat with chemicals were initiated in the early 1950s with little success. In the early 1970s, a number of private concerns developed and tested chemicals like Dalapon, DPX-3778, Estrone, GA3, Hybrex, LY-195259, Mendok,
RH series, WL-84811, etc.
The use of Chemical Hybridizing Agents (CHAs) in crop breeding has now attained noticeable success in rice and wheat in China and US. Using CHA approach, sufficiently large quantity of hybrid seed is processed in France, Italy and US, which are way ahead in commercializing wheat hybrids. Their success indicates that CHA is a powerful tool to create new hybrid varieties and will be an effective technique in wheat breeding. Sethi and Gill (2003) also advocated that CHAs can facilitate the onset of sterility and mimic genetic system for hybrid products. A number of chemicals, synthesized at NCL, Pune, have been identified to exhibit selective male sterility. Some of these chemicals also showed bad effect on some morphological characters (Mahajan et al., 1998).
Keeping the above discussion in view, the present investigation was carried out to study the effect of CHA on morphological characters in wheat, while inducing male sterility.
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