Abstract
The development of a drought tolerant tomato cultivar has been a long-term research objective in Bangladesh. To achieve this objective, we evaluated the effects of water stress in sixteen tomato cultivars; four were small fruitproducing types, five were intermediate and seven were large fruit types. Performance under stress was evaluated for nine characters including yield, flowering and fruiting characteristics and vegetative growth. As expected, yield was reduced significantly by water stress in all the cultivars, but the response varied considerably. The cultivar Chibikko performed best among the small fruit types for most characters including yield as did TM 0126 among the intermediate fruit-sized types. In general, small and intermediate fruit types performed better under water stress than large fruit types. Nevertheless, the large fruit cultivar Severnianin did well and was clearly superior to other large fruit types. We conclude that among the best performing cultivars, TM 0126 is a superior water stress-tolerant cultivar that requires further studies as a potential candidate for the Bangladesh breeding program and as a material for the elucidation of the mechanism of tomato drought tolerance.
