EVALUATION OF VARIABILITY FOR SOME COMPONENTS OF PLANT YIELD IN WINTER WHEAT

Breeders are permanently looking for effective methods for developing cultivars with improved yield. For that goal, they should include different genotypes in many cross combination to obtain the recombination of desirable genes. The biological material was composed of 11 winter wheat varieties with different origin: Alex, Boema, Ciprian, Izvor, Glosa (Romania); Laurentio, Renan (France); Josef, Galio (Austria); Akteor, Exotic Germany). The wheat varieties were evaluated regarding the following traits: plant height; spike length; spikelet number/spike; spike weight; grain number/spike and grain weight/spike. This study evaluated the diversity of 11 winter wheat varieties with different origins for some plant yield traits, and the possibilities of using these varieties in breeding programs. Higher plant stature of Josef, Galio and Laurentio varieties was associated with the highest values of spike weight, number and weight of grains/spike, and values above the mean for spike length and spikelets number/spike, respectively. The results of this research show that some varieties achieved high values for different traits of plant yield. Therefore, these varieties are successively used  for further breeding programs based on diallel-crossing methods, to develop new wheat varieties. For these varieties, the spike weight has the highest and significant contribution (64,83%) to the achievement of plant yield, followed by the plant height, which contributes with 10,26 % to the variability of this trait. The spike length and grain’s number/spike had the lowest influence on plant yield. According to the high diversity between some varieties like the following Glosa-Akteor; Izvor-Josef; Izvor-Akteor; Josef-Exotic, these pairs are suitable for crossing to obtain hybrids with useful gene combinations for different yield components. Considering the highest variance for plant height and spike length, we appreciate that it is possible to identify valuable gene combinations for these traits in segregating generations.