Characterizing agronomic and shoot morphological diversity across 263 Wild Emmer Wheat Accessions

S. Rahman; Shahidul Islam; E. Nevo; M A. U. Saeed; Q. Liu; Rajeev Varshney; Wujun Ma

doi:10.3390/agriculture13040759

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Characterizing agronomic and shoot morphological diversity across 263 Wild Emmer Wheat Accessions

Journal article

Open access

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Characterizing agronomic and shoot morphological diversity across 263 Wild Emmer Wheat Accessions

S. Rahman, Shahidul Islam, E. Nevo, M A. U. Saeed, Q. Liu, Rajeev Varshney and Wujun Ma

Agriculture, Vol.13(4), 759

2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13040759

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Abstract

Wild emmer, the direct progenitor of modern durum and bread wheat, has mostly been studied for grain quality, biotic, and abiotic stress-related traits. Accordingly, it should also have a certain amount of diversity for morphological and agronomic traits. Despite having a high chance of huge diversity, it has not been deeply explored. In the current study, 263 wild emmer accessions collected from different regions of Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria were characterized for a total of 19 agronomic and shoot morphological traits. Three trials were carried out in Western Australia, which demonstrated a large variation in these traits. The average phenotypic diversity (H’) was 0.91 as quantified by Shannon’s diversity index. A high heritability was recorded for most of the traits, where biomass/plant and yield/plant were identified as the most potential traits. Correlation analysis revealed several significant associations between traits, including significant positive correlation between yield and tiller number, first leaf area, spike length, and biomass/plant. The principal component analysis (PCA) demonstrated that most of the traits contributed to the overall observed variability. The cluster analysis categorized 263 accessions into five clusters on average. On the other hand, accessions were categorized into eight populations based on the collection region and a comparative analysis demonstrated considerable variations between populations for plant height, spike length, and flag leaf area. Despite the low yield, several wild emmer accessions demonstrated superior performance compared to modern bread wheat cultivars, when selection was based on combining yield with multiple traits. These observations indicate that wild emmer contains a broad gene pool for several agronomic and shoot morphological traits, which can be utilized for bread and durum wheat improvement.

Details

Title: Characterizing agronomic and shoot morphological diversity across 263 Wild Emmer Wheat Accessions
Authors/Creators: S. Rahman
Shahidul Islam
E. Nevo - University of Haifa
M A. U. Saeed
Q. Liu
Rajeev Varshney - Murdoch University, Food Futures Institute
Wujun Ma - Murdoch University, Centre for Crop and Food Innovation
Publication Details: Agriculture, Vol.13(4), 759
Publisher: MDPI
Identifiers: 991005566468807891
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
Murdoch Affiliation: Food Futures Institute; Centre for Crop and Food Innovation
Resource Type: Journal article

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Collaboration types: Domestic collaboration; International collaboration
Citation topics: 3 Agriculture, Environment & Ecology; 3.4 Crop Science; 3.4.96 QTL
Web Of Science research areas: Agronomy
ESI research areas: Agricultural Sciences