Evaluation of Iranian and Foreign Summer Savory (Satureja hortensis L.) Accessions by Multivariate Statistical Analysis

Summer savory (Satureja hortensis L.) is a valuable medicinal plant with useful properties and applications, has been recently used in the pharmaceutical industry due to its high level of carvacrol, thymol and rosmarinic acid. In this research, different accessions of this plant were collected from other countries and different regions of Iran. An experiment was conducted in 2019 year based on randomized complete block design to evaluate the morphological, phytochemical and essential oil traits of these accessions in Ardabil climatic condition. Analysis of variance showed that there were significant differences for the most studied traits among 20 accessions. The important traits such as plant diameter (19.78-45.29 cm2), shoot dry weight (0.08-2.05 g/p), 100-seed weight (0.021 to 0.126 g/p), and essential oil yields (0.23 to 2.21 g/h) were varied among accessions. The Ahvaz and Greece accession were the best in term of vegetative and phytochemical traits respectively. Maximum correlation was shown between bract number and seed length per plant (0.96). Cluster analysis, classified the accessions into five major groups. Factor analysis indicated that the five factors explained 77.78 of the variation among the accessions. The results of path analysis showed that the leaf area, leaf length/width, number of flowers in inflorescence, phenolic content and shoot dry weight had effect in essential oil yield of accessions and phenolic content had the highest direct and positive effect (0.8). The results suggested that there was a considerable genetic variation among S. hortensis accessions.