Study of the yield and some important plant of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) genotypes at different moisture levels

Introduction After cereals, the second most important source of human food is legumes. Common bean is seventh major world food crop that has been widely affected by environmental conditions such as drought. Despite of the economic importance of common bean; few studies have been done on genetics and genetic resource evaluation. Materials and methods Given the importance of stress in this study to evaluate the resistance of bean genotypes to different levels of drought stress, an experiment was performed to evaluate the influence of drought stress on common bean yield and its components, so a factorial experiment was conducted in a completely randomized design at greenhouse in Ilam University. In this experiment, four Common bean genotypes (Naz, Akhtar, Ks41128 and G11867) were evaluated for resistance to different levels of drought stress included of 70, 50 and 30% of field capacity. Drought was imposed 10 d after planting. The measured parameters include dry weight, plant height, grain yield per plant, pod length, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per plant. Results and discussion The results showed that there were significant differences between studied traits of genotypes studied, suggesting genetic variation of genotypes. Also there were significant difference between the drought levels for all traits and water deficient can decrease all studied traits although there were not any difference between mild and strong stress levels. The results of the reaction of genotypes to drought stress showed that KS41128 genotype highest yield percentage changes and yield components showed in drought stress condition. Two genotypes (Akhtar and Ks41128) had a higher than average yield under unstressed conditions but  yield of Ks41128 is fairly strongly affected by stress, and another but is less affected by stress. Conclusions Regards to change percent of most traits, Akhtar (a genotype with light red seed, standing form, and addition to suitable marketing and quality) had the least change percent so could use for breeding programs to release water stress tolerance varieties.