摘要：Water stress is the most important abiotic fac-tor limiting the germination, morphological and non-enzymatic attributes of plants. It also hampers the yield and firm crop stand establishment. For agricultural crops water stress poses a constant challenge and has been considered a severe con-straint for the productivity of global agriculture and in the near future its severity and intensity are pre-dicted to increase, towards water stress legumes shows high sensitivity. So, the present study was conducted to examine the water stress tolerance of twenty mung bean cultivars/lines based on the seed gemination, morphological and non-enzymatic characteristics. Activities of seed germination at-tributes(GI and G.E), biomass production of seed-ling were adversely affected due to the imposition of water stress through PEG while MET and CUE enhanced significantly and G% remained un-affected whereas chlorophyll a, b and total chloro-phyll, phenolics, proline, ascorbic acid, H2O,fla-vonoids, total soluble proteins decreased due to the PEG-induced water stress but malondialdehyde (MDA) and glycine betaine contents were in-creased. The activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD)were increased in all cultivars/lines being the maximum in line V14. The activities of CAT and POD were enhanced in line V14 under the con-ditions of water stress. In conclusion, line V14 was recommended as water stress tolerant and V19 as water stress sensitive.
