Assessment of Morphological Diversity in Local Landraces of Desi Type Chickpea in West Iran

Development of the last Dise type chickpea cultivar goes back more than 40 years. This project was performed aimed to purify and evaluate genetic variation of local Desi type chickpea landraces of Kurdistan, West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan. During 2012-14 seed of local varieties of these locations were collected and purified physically. In 2015, 70 top lines along with two control varieties, Kaka and Pirouz were cultivated and evaluated in an 8 × 9 simple rectangular lattice design at three stations including Saral of Kurdistan, Maragheh and Urmia. During the experiment period, traits including plant standing, days to flowering, days to maturity, seed per pod, pod per plant, plant height, 100 seeds weight and seed yield were recorded. Combined analysis of variance was revealed significant differences among genotypes for days to maturity, seed per pod, pod per plant, 100 seeds weight and seed yield. Also, the interaction of genotype× location was significant for traits of days to maturity, pod per plant, plant height and seed yield. The highest seed yield was obtained by line No. 2, which was not significantly different from the check variety, Pirouz. The highest heritability was related to the 100 seeds weight, seed yield and number of days to flowering, respectively. Among these traits, grain yield had the greatest genetic advance. According to the results of cluster analysis, genotypes were grouped into four classes. These results were confirmed with 98% accuracy using discriminant function analysis. The results of principle component analysis and graphical display of biplot showed that the grain yield was positive and significant correlation with the number of pods per plant and the weight of one hundred seeds. On the other hand, genotypes No. 1, 2, 21 and 67 could be identified as the best genotypes for improvement programs.