Assessment of agro-morphological diversity existing in some of Aegilops species

The genus of Aegilops is an important wild relative of common wheat, and the species in this genus have a key role in hexaploid wheat evolution and they are the donor of D and B genomes, directly and indirectly. To assess the agro-morphological variation in Iranian Aegilops species, 109 accessions belonging to 8 species collected from different areas of Iran were evaluated. Statistical parameters for traits were calculated and Shannon’s index and phenotypic coefficient of variance were used to estimate genetic diversity. The results of descriptive statistics showed a considerable variation between and within different species. The highest value of the coefficient of variance was observed for grain yield, harvest index, plant height, number of fertile tillers, leaf width, leaf length and biomass, respectively. In addition, the highest Shannon’s index was belonged to main spike length, leaf width, number of spikelets per spike and number of grain per spike, respectively. Correlation coefficients between grain yield and other characteristics in the studied species was different and related to their genomic structure. Principal component analysis identified three components that explained 79.95% of the total variation of measured traits. Dendrogram obtained from cluster analysis revealed that phonological and agro-morphological traits could be distinguished different species from each other. In total, the results of this research revealed that there is a high level of genetic diversity in different species of Iranian Aegilops and therefore special attention to this germplasm is necessary.