Response of wild type sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) accessions to pre- flowering drought stress

A study was conducted to evaluate the response of eleven wild type sorghum accessions to pre-flowering moisture stress. The experiment was carried out at Jimma University College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine research site under greenhouse condition in 2013/2014 cropping season. A randomized complete blocks design with two replications was used. The experiment was irrigated by a movable tubular irrigation system the whole season. Pre- flowering drought stress was induced by totally withholding irrigation from panicle differentiation to flowering. A total of 11 morphological characters putatively related with crop performance under drought were studied.  Significant variation was found for leaf rolling, root length, leaf drying, plant height and flag leaf width; however, the remaining traits showed non-significant difference among treatments due to moisture stress at (p≤0.05). Based on this finding, accessions TS217 and DA119 collected from Tigray and Amhara region respectively are found to have superior pre-flowering drought tolerance followed by accessionTS211compared with the check B35. Hence; the authors recommend using accession DA119 and TS217 as parent materials during improvement of sorghum for drought tolerance. However, since this result is limited to data collected in one year in one location and does not compare yields, including other locally adapted lines and doing the experiment over locations and seasons is advisable.   Key words: Sorghum, drought, accession, pre-flowering, selection.