Assessment of the Genetic Diversity in 160 Safflower Genotypes Focusing on oil Quality Characteristics

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) is one of the most important oilseed crops in the world, which has gained great importance in Iran due to its high tolerance to drought and salinity. Two important factors in the development of safflower cultivation are the increase of oil yield and early maturity. Considering that the most important step in plant breeding is creating diversity and using this diversity in selection, in this experiment, a large number of safflower genotypes were evaluated in terms of important quantitative and qualitative traits.

In this study, 160 local and imported genotypes were evaluated in the form of an augmented design with three controls (introduced cultivars Goldasht, Padideh and Golmehr) in five replicates as winter cultivation, and traits such as flowering date, Plant height, number of branches, spininess, seed yield, oil percentage, 1000 seed weight, seed protein content and fatty acid profile including percentage of palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic and linolenic acids were investigated.

The results showed the existence of a range of 23 days for flowering date, a range of 95 cm in plant height and a range of 16% in the amount of seed oil. Also, a large variation was observed in seed yield and other evaluated traits. The results showed that the amount of seed protein in some tested genotypes was up to 20%, which is very important in terms of the nutritional value of meal. Examining the fatty acid profile with the help of GC showed that 24 genotypes had oleic acid content higher than 55%. The results of partial correlation showed that the genotypes with the highest percentage of oleic and palmitic acid usually have the highest percentage of oil and there is a strong negative correlation between oleic and linoleic, so that the decrease or increase of one is associated with the increase or decrease of the other. High oil percentage was observed only in thorny genotypes and no significant correlation was observed between oil percentage and seed protein content, so that genotypes with high oil percentage and high seed protein percentage were observed at the same time.

Overall, the results of this study showed that there is a great diversity between the collected genotypes, which can be used in breeding programs.