**Abstract**

One of the most critical environmental factors for plant growth is water deficiency and it can be anticipated that climate change will exacerbate this problem in the future. Plants have evolved a variety of different mechanisms at morphological, physiological, cellular, and biochemical levels to overcome water stress conditions. Maize is one of the three leading global cereals, which helps to feed the world. Several biometrical techniques, that is, North Carolina Model, generation mean analysis, diallel and line × tester, are available for genetic analysis. An effective breeding strategy for developing water-deficit tolerant varieties considerably depends on knowledge of the inheritance mechanism of the stress tolerance in maize, high broad-sense heritability and additive genetic variance for the characters which are contributing to drought tolerance. Thus, this study aims toward to explore the inheritance of physiobiochemical traits that lead to increase stress tolerance in maize under the water deficit conditions. This also exhibited a differential pattern of gene action for these traits, suggesting that genotypes possess significant differences for physio-biochemical traits that help to resistance of maize against water deficit stress. Our findings open a door to achieve higher yield of maize under drought stress. These insights might be useful to the plant breeders and farmers for developing water-deficit tolerant maize varieties, and morphological and physio-biochemical markers.

**Keywords:** gene action, heritability, maize (*Zea mays* L.), physiobiochemical traits, water deficit
