The Morphological Characters of Spike in Taxonomy of Tetraploid and Hexaploid Triticum L. Species in Iran

Due to high morphological similarity between Triticum turgidum L. and T. aestivum L., using 34 quantitative and nine qualitative spike morphological characters, the taxonomic status and the variations of spike morphology between 22 accessions of T. turgidum and 42 accessions of T. aestivum were studied. Consequently, the statistical coefficients such as Mean, Coefficient of Variation, Cluster Analysis and Factor Analysis were applied. The results of this study show that these two species were differentiated by spike morphological characters, such as the length of spike and glume, and the awn length of lemma and glume. The diversity and variability of spike morphological characters among T. aestivum accessions are higher than those of T. turgidum accessions. It can be concluded that there would be a relatively high gene flow in T. aestivum accessions.