GENETIC VARIABILITY ASSESSMENT IN BREAD WHEAT (TRITICUM AESTIVUM L.) CULTIVARS UNDER DROUGHT STRESS USING MULTIVARIATE STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Genetic diversity of plants determines their potential for improved efficiency and hence their use for breeding, which eventually may result in enhanced food production. Plant uniformity, which can be resulted by the use of modern plant breeding techniques, can produce plants, which are more efficient by means of different goals including enhanced resistance under stress, however much more research must be performed to indicate the most optimized methods that can be used for the production of efficient plants. This is of significance for the production of food for the world increasing population (Fu and Somers, 2009). Estimation of genetic distance is one of appropriate tools for parental selection in wheat hybridization programs. Appropriate selection of the parents is essential to be used in crossing nurseries to enhance the genetic recombination for potential yield increase and genetic variability. The higher genetic distance between parents, the higher heterosis in progeny can be observed. One of the important approaches to wheat breeding is hybridization and subsequent selection. Parents’ choice is the first step in plant breeding program through hybridization.Some appropriate methods, such as cluster analysis and PCA for genetic diversity identification, parental selection, tracing the pathway to evolution of crops, centre of origin and diversity, and study interaction between the environment are currently available. The results of cluster analysis and PCA may have relative differences with each other. Therefore, before using cluster analysis, the principle components may be avoided. The main objective of this study is to capture the potential genetic diversity between wheat genotypes grown in Iran by using cluster analysis and cluster analysis-PCA-based methods

کلیدواژه ها:

genetic variability ، principal component analysis ، cluster analysis ، ward method