Morphological and agronomical comparative study of genetic diversity of common winter wheat cultivars

Gergana Desheva, Manol Deshev

Abstract: The aim of this study was to assess the genetic diversity among cultivars with different geographical origin in term of 7 morphological and 7 agronomical traits. Twenty five common winter wheat varieties were included in three growing season evaluation using randomized complete block designs with 3 replications on plots of 10 m2. The significant differences among evaluated varieties for plant shape, leaf-flag attitude, spike shape, spike attitude and spike awnedness were recorded as well as the high variation for the most of the agronomical studied traits were found. The first 5 principal components explained a very large proportion of the total variation (73.56%). Spike related characters such as spike length without awn (0.62), spikelets number per spike (0.89), grain number per spike (0.92) and grain weight per spike (0.83) strongly associated with PC1. The clustered heat map based on the Ward method and using the first fives PCs grouped the genotypes into five clusters. The clustering of the studied wheat genotypes was not related to their geographical origin but it referred to specific phenotypic characters. The results of the study will be useful for the breeding improvement programs of common winter wheat.

Keywords: agronomical traits; heat map; morphological traits; PCA; wheat

Date published: 2021-08-20