Open Access

ARTICLE

A Study on Genotype-by-Environment Interaction Analysis for Agronomic Traits of Maize Genotypes Across Huang-Huai-Hai Region in China

Haiwang Yue¹, Jianwei Wei¹, Junliang Xie¹, Shuping Chen¹, Haicheng Peng¹, Hongmei Cao², Junzhou Bu^1,*, Xuwen Jiang^3,*

1 Dryland Farming Institute, Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Hebei Provincial Key Laboratory of Crops Drought Resistance Research, Hengshui, 053000, China
2 Soil and Fertilizer Workstation of Hengshui Agriculture and Rural Bureau, Hengshui, 053000, China
3 Maize Research Institute/College of Agronomy, Qingdao Agricultural University, Qingdao, 266109, China

* Corresponding Authors: Junzhou Bu. Email: ; Xuwen Jiang. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Plant Physiology for Crop Production and Sustainable Agriculture)

Phyton-International Journal of Experimental Botany 2022, 91(1), 57-81. https://doi.org/10.32604/phyton.2022.017308

Received 30 April 2021; Accepted 24 June 2021; Issue published 16 August 2021

Abstract

Facing the trend of increasing population, how to increase maize grain yield is a very important issue to ensure food security. In this study, 28 nationally approved maize hybrids were evaluated across 24 different climatic conditions for two consecutive years (2018–2019). The purpose of this study was to select high-yield with stable genotypes and identify important agronomic traits for maize breeding program improvement. The results of this study showed that the genotype ╳ environment interaction effects of the 12 evaluated agronomic traits was highly significant (P < 0.001). We introduced a novel multi-trait genotype-ideotype distance index (MGIDI) to select genotypes based on multiple agronomic traits. The selection process exhibited by this method is unique and easy to understand, so the MGIDI index will have more and more important applications in future multi-environment trials (METs) research. The genotypes selected by the MGIDI index were G22, G10, G12 and G1 as the high yielding and stable genotypes. The parents of these selected genotypes have the ability to play a greater role as the basic germplasm in the breeding process. A new form of genotype (G) main effects and genotype (G) -by-environment (E) interaction (GGE) technician, genotype*yield*trait (GYT) biplot, based on multiple traits for genotypes selection was also applied in this study. The GYT biplot ranked genotypes by combining grain yield with other evaluated agronomic traits, and displayed the distribution of their traits, namely strengths and weaknesses.

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