Identification of stable restorers and high-yielding hybrids using diverse sorghum male sterile cytoplasmic sources and established pollen parents under different water regimes.

Sorghum hybrids demonstrated increased productivity and helped offset the decreasing cultivated areas, particularly in Asia. The diversity in cytoplasmic male sterility systems, stability of restorers and high yield of sorghum is an important factor for achieving food security and sustainability. In sorghum, hybrid production has been limited to A1 cytoplasmic source to date, primarily due to limited number of restorers on other cytoplasmic sources. This work aimed at filling this gap through diversifying and assessing the producibility and stability of cytoplasmic backgrounds across environments, evaluating the stability of restorers across cytoplasms and environments, and evaluating the performance of the hybrid F1 products under different water regimes across cropping seasons. The effects of genotypes and interactions between the genotypes and the tested environments were shown visually using GGE biplot, which also categorized the genotypes based on performance per se and stability. Analysis of variance revealed significant (P < 0.001) differences between genotypes, environments and their interaction components for all the plant characteristics studied. The various GGE biplot patterns revealed that the restorers G4 (IS 33844-5), G5 (M 35-1-19), G8 (ICSV 15014), and G10 (ICSR 13009) were stable across environments and cytoplasms. We observed the following order of superiority in cytoplasmic restoration and seed producibility, A