~ 898 ~ Journal of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry 2020; 9(1): 898-901 E-ISSN: 2278-4136 P-ISSN: 2349-8234 JPP 2020; 9(1): 898-901 Received: 22-11-2019 Accepted: 24-12-2019 Suresh Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana, India Om Prakash Bishnoi Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana, India Rishi Kumar Behl Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana, India Renu Munjal Department of Botany and Plant Physiology, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana, India Corresponding Author: Suresh Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana, India Study on potentials of triticale as an alternative of wheat in India Suresh, Om Prakash Bishnoi, Rishi Kumar Behl and Renu Munjal Abstract Triticale is the first man made cereal developed to combine yield potential of wheat with rye. In changing climatic conditions of North Western Plain Zone (NWPZ) of India triticale can be an alternative to wheat if certain shortcomings of this crop are corrected. In this study fourteen genotypes of wheat and triticale are evaluated for genetic variability. Significant variability was found for all the yield attributing traits among these genotypes. High heritability and genetic advance was also noticed for grain yield, biological yield and plant height. Comparison of triticale with wheat genotypes gave an idea that yield potential of triticale can be improved by modifying these genotypes for biological yield, plant height and grain yield itself. Keywords: Genetic variability, NWPZ, triticale, wheat, yield potential Introduction Food is one of the basic needs of all organisms on this planet. Every organism including human depend on plants for nutritious diet. Among all crop plants, cereals and pulses have more importance in our diet. The progress of every country is based on their food production industries which are directly based on agriculture. In past century, scientist have tried and got success in development of improved varieties of cereals such as rice, maize and wheat. Among these three cereal crops, wheat (Triticum aestivum L. em. Thell) is the only polyploidy species which is cultivated all over the globe under different temperature and water regime conditions. The importance of this crop can be realized with the fact that around 766 million ton of wheat is produced annually (FAO, 2019) [4] . Development of fertilizer responding dwarf varieties and improved management practices are the key factors of improved wheat production. But at present the annual wheat production is increasing with a speed which is quite low than global population growth rate (Ray et al., 2013) [15] . The global population is expected to reach around 10 billion in just next 30 years which will lead to huge hunger (Hickey et al., 2019) [6] . Under such situation there is quick need of development of varieties which can tolerate the changing climatic condition and have higher yield potential. But at present wheat is facing a problem of yield stagnation due to exploration of already existing genetic variability among wheat germplasm (Ray et al., 2012) [14] . This stagnation barrier can be break if new source of variability is introduced in wheat breeding programme. Further North western plain zone of India is facing serious challenges of heat and drought stresses. Introduction of new species which can tolerate the changing environment condition and has a potential of higher yield than wheat can be an alternative strategy. For this, scientists have developed first man made cereal, triticale (X triticosecale Wittmack) by crossing wheat spikes with rye (Secale cerale L.) as a pollen parent (Wilson, 1876) [20] . The idea behind this was that rye has more genes for abiotic stress tolerance which can be combined with higher yield potential of wheat. Although triticale was not adopted by people for a long time but in recent years scientists have found that triticale genotypes have more diversity and stability under changing environmental conditions (Barnett et al. 2006; Kozak et al., 2007; McGoverin et al., 2011) [3, 9, 10] . Various studies have shown that triticale are more tolerant to biotic and abiotic stress and have better nutritional food and feed quality than wheat (Peña, 2004; Niedziela et al. 2014) [13, 12] . These studies have attracted the interest of breeders to improve triticale genotypes as a potential crop of coming era. It is also used in wheat breeding where triticale can be used as source of genetic variability and mapping population in gene tagging. Keeping these things in mind the present investigation was carried out to compare genotypic variability among wheat and triticale genotypes and to find out traits which can be targeted to make triticale a potential alternative of wheat.