Sources of characters useful for breeding in hulless barley

Background. In the present-day situation, the problems pertaining to the nutritional quality of food and feed are quite pertinent for fodder production and cereal farming. The prospect to exploit hulless barley is regarded as a promising trend of agricultural research, because its grain contains chemical compounds of higher value than those in hulled barley. However, among the limiting factors of hulless barley cultivation, low yield should be mentioned, along with poor lodging resistance and susceptibility to fungal diseases. Therefore, the task of searching for and comprehensive studying of source material for hulless barley breeding is essential as the first step towards the development of high-yielding and adaptable cultivars.Materials and methods. Twenty hulless barley accessions, representing 15 botanical varieties, served as the target material for the study. Their genotypes were evaluated in the northern forest steppe environments of Tyumen Province (2015– 2017) according to the guidelines developed by the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) and field trial methods by B. A. Dospekhov. Correlation analysis was used for statistical processing of experimental data.Results and conclusion. The degree of interactions between the studied characters was measured, and their effect size in the formation of the yield was shown for hulless barley accessions. An inverse correlation of medium strength (r = –0.37) was observed between plant height and lodging resistance, and a direct relationship between plant height and yield was recorded (r = 0.37). The yield was most closely associated with grain weight per plant (r = 0.61) and 1000 grain weight (r = 0.54). The research results showed that C.I.10975 (k-30624, Ethiopia), Liguleless (k-29894, Tajikistan), Schwarze Nackte Kraftborn (k-25788, Germany) and ‘De printempe’ (k-23491, France) had relatively high yield combined with a number of other useful traits.