Abstract

Global warming and the growing rise in the price of bakery and feed grains make the problem of hereditary increase in the drought resistance of grain crops one of the most important tasks of ensuring the food security of mankind. Based on the dismemberment of the complex structure of the properties of drought resistance of cereals (phenotyping), the limitations of the canonical genecentric approach and approaches of molecular genetics to solving the problem of a radical hereditary increase in drought resistance are shown. A priority epigenetic approach to hereditary increase in drought resistance is proposed, based on the Theory of Ecological-Genetic Organization of Quantitative Traits (TEGOQT), which operates not with components of productivity, but with seven genetic-physiological systems (GPS), whose positive contributions increase yields: 1) attractions; 2) microdistributions of the attracted plastic substances between grains and chaff in the ear; 3) adaptability (drought, cold, frost, heat, salt resistance, etc.); 4) horizontal immunity; 5) “payment” by dry biomass for the limiting factor of soil nutrition (N, P, K…); 6) tolerance to thickening of agrophytocenosis; 7) hereditary variability in the duration of the phases of ontogenesis. This article examines one of the subcomponents of a complex GPS – adaptability, in particular – drought resistance, in the formation of which at least 22 component traits are involved.

Keywords

Cereals, drought tolerance, phenotyping, eco-genetic (epigenetic) nature of productivity traits, management of the selection of parental pairs for hybridization