Assessing morpho-phenological characteristics of synthetic hexaploid wheats

Synthetic hexaploid wheats (SHWs), amphiploids resulting from the crosses between durum wheat and Aegilops species, are valuable resources for enhancing wheat genetic diversity and useful for the exploitation of alleles outside the primary wheat gene pool. In this research, 50 SHW lines along with five bread wheat cultivars as controls (Onfarm4, Arg, Ofogh, Narin, Backcross Roshan) were evaluated based on different morpho-phenological traits in the laboratory and research field of Faculty of Agriculture, University of Birjand, Iran. The results of analysis of variance showed that there was a significant difference between different genotypes for the studied traits except for the tiller number, indicating the existence of genetic diversity among genotypes. The estimated heritability for different traits ranged from 26% to 90%. Comparison of mean between SHW lines and the control cultivars showed that there were statistically significant differences for most of the studied traits except for spike length, tiller number and 1000-grain weight. Cluster analysis based on Ward's minimum variance method classified the studied genotypes into three clusters. Biplot diagram based on two principal components that accounted for 53.09% of the total variations also confirmed the grouping from the cluster analysis. The results of this study showed that the general superiority was related to the control cultivars, but high genetic diversity was observed among the synthetic wheat lines for many of the studied traits and therefore the superior lines for important traits can be selected as parents to produce new wheat cultivars in the future breeding programs.