Abstract

Common bunt (Caused by Tilletia caries and T. foetida) can greatly reduce wheat grain yield in susceptible cultivars when no fungicidal seed treatments were used. Planting resistance cultivars is beneficial, especially for lowincome farmers who cannot afford seed treatments. In this paper, a set of nine spring genotypes and two winter wheat genotypes were planted in the greenhouse under two common bunt treatments, control and inoculated, to identify the effect of common bunt infection on agronomic traits with the hope of identifying resistance characteristics before plant maturity. Common bunt infection was found to increase the seedling vigour, delay heading, increase head length, increase root length and decrease the biological yield in the susceptible genotypes. The response of the resistant and susceptible genotypes to the common bunt infection was the same for all the studied traits except for the root length. The resistant genotypes were found to have longer roots under common bunt infection than the control. However, the susceptible genotypes did not reveal this response.