**5. Conclusion**

Under recent climatic changes, both the biotic and abiotic stresses are a serious threat for global food security and plant production sustainability. Among the abiotic stresses, water-deficit stress is gaining attention due to its adverse effect on plant growth and development and significant reduction in plant yield causing global food insecurity. Various morphological, biochemical, and physiological mechanisms are affected by water-deficit stress that hampers plant productivity. To tackle the adverse effect of the water stress on plants, certain mechanisms are adopted by the plants which enhance drought tolerance. Genetic improvement of maize for various traits which are contributing to drought tolerance relies primarily on understanding the genetic control of the traits. Knowledge of genetics or genetic control of these traits enables breeders to formulate techniques and strategies for trait selection to bring out the desired genetic improvement in the target traits. Therefore, understanding the genetics of important traits is of paramount importance for rapid and efficient improvement in any crop. This chapter deals with the genetic control of physiobiochemical traits so that effective breeding strategies and selection can be employed to achieve greater progress in maize genetic improvement programs. It can be stated that the genotypes which are maintaining high various physiobiochemical traits such as chlorophyll fluorescence, leaf chlorophyll content, relative water content, various enzymatic antioxidants activities, proline, and sugars accumulation under water-deficit stress are considered tolerant genotypes under deficit moisture stress and used for the selection process. Therefore, these findings might be useful to the maize breeders and farmers for future phenotypic and genotypic association studies. Also, it may be further studied to develop morphological and physiobiochemical markers and will encourage to develop water-deficit tolerance maize varieties. Genetic components depict the involvement of nonadditive and additive genetic effects in the inheritance of various physiobiochemical traits, suggesting that genotypes possess significant differences for these traits. Clearly, additional attention and research on molecular findings of response and resistance of maize generations are needed to identify most resistant crop varieties in field conditions particularly under water-deficit stress.

*Genetic Interaction and Inheritance of Physiobiochemical Traits Can Predict Tolerance of Maize… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111599*
