The Study of Morphological Characteristics of Old and New Barely Cultivars

In order tocomparison ofmorphologicaltraits between newandoldcultivarsof barleyroots (Hordeum vulgare L.) an experiment was conducted in greenhouse condition in Faculty of Agriculture, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in 2011. The type of experiment was a completely randomized design with eight treatment and three replications. Experimental treatments were 4 new cultivars of barley incloud (Nosrat, Youssof, Fajr30 and Nick) and old cultivars(Reihan, Kavir, Zarjoe and Valfajr).Seeding wasoccurredinplastic tubeswith washed sands andsampeling was occurred with destroyed plastic bages in the end of the four stage incloud 4-6 leaf stage, stem elongation stage, flowering and maturity stage.Traits incloudtotalroot length, area, diameter, volume, and root dry weightand yield and yieldcomponentswere measure and compared. Resultsshowed that, there was significant differencebetween new and oldcultivars of barley rootsinallstages of development, specially the most prominentdifferencewas inthe lategrowing season.In root elongation characteristics (along the mainrootlength, total index of root length) weresuperior tothe oldcultivars, but inothercharacteristics(size, surface, diameter androot dryweight) the newcultivarswere better. In thenew cultivars, horizontaland lateralrootdistributionin the soilwere higherthanold cultivars and old cultivarshad longitudinaland verticalspread ofroots.Generally,in the soils withadequatemoistureand air condition like this experiment conditions,theroot systemoftheplantsgrowthdeeply andtheir seminal rootsas possibleinthe remainingactivethroughout the growing season. For this reasonincreasein root traitswas observedduring the growing season to maturity.