Graduate Project

Drought causes limited productivity of maize: drought tolerant corn hybrid

Due to drought stress, there is a significant amount of loss in corn yield caused by weather changes such as rising temperatures and the decrease of rainfall. With the help of new genetic tools, improvements in conventional crop yields have shown some success over the past several decades. Researchers have found that the native corn genes allow drought tolerance by comparing populations and parent lines in the drought environment. A managed stress environment (MSE) plays an important role by providing the researchers an ideal place to manage the heat stress and irrigation water amount. This, in turn helps, to validate candidate regions and genes by conducting massively parallel transcript profiling studies. This type of study was performed in the field of research of drought tolerant corn and project management, which focused on data collection from the field. This research took place in Woodland, California, with a climate known to be droughtstricken. It was concluded that modern hybrid seeds have improved in root distribution and functional stay-green, and that yield in drought conditions has increased. The same types of qualities are shown in Optimum Aquamax Hybrid seeds, which are one of the hybrid seeds released by Pioneer Hi-Bred in 2011. This hybrid showed a five percent increase in the average yield. As a result, crop yields were shown to increase with the use of drought tolerant hybrid seeds. This Professional Science Masters (PSM) Internship was performed in the areas of research of corn and trial management. The main focus of the PSM Intern was on collecting and organizing the data from the fields and on gaining knowledge of how agricultural research projects are conducted by industry.

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