Effect of drought stress on male fertility restoration in A3 CMS-inducing cytoplasm of sorghum

Use of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) in hybrid breeding requires effective male fertility-restoring lines. In sorghum, very few restoring lines that can restore fertility in A(3) CMS have been reported. To identify the reasons for this deficiency, F-1 and F-2 hybrids of an A(3) CMS line crossed with the line IS1112C, a donor of fertility-restoring (Rf) genes for A3 cytoplasm, and testcrosses of fertile plants to A(3) CMS lines were grown under contrasting water availability regimes in dryland and irrigated field plots. In the irrigated plots the frequency of fertile plants in testcrosses was twice that in dryland plots (P < 0.05). Fertile plants from the F-2 family grown in the irrigated plots showed significantly higher restoration ability than fertile plants from the same family grown in dryland plots. F-3 plants from the F-2 family grown in irrigated plots yielded on average a sixfold higher frequency of fertile plants in testcrosses than F-3 plants derived from dryland plots (P < 0.01). Fertility of testcross hybrids correlated negatively with air vapor pressure deficit (VPD) at flowering (r = -0.96; P < 0.01) suggesting that VPD is a trigger for downregulation of Rf genes for A(3) cytoplasm. (C) 2017 Crop Science Society of China and Institute of Crop Science, CAAS. Production and hosting by Elsevier B. V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.