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DIVERSITY FOR SEEDLING VIGOR IN WILD BARLEY (HORDEUM VULGARE L. SUBSP. SPONTANEUM) GERMPLASM

KULDEEP TYAGI¹⁺, MYOUNG RYOUL PARK¹⁺, HYO JEONG LEE¹, CHONG AE LEE², SHAFIQ REHMAN³, BRIAN STEFFENSON⁴, KUI JAE LEE⁵, SONG JOONG YUN^1,6*

Abstract: Seedling vigor is important for improving stand establishment of barley crops, particularly in arid regions and areas where the soil temperature is low at sowing time. Three hundred and fifteen wild barley accessions from the Wild Barley Diversity Collection (WBDC) were evaluated for nine seedling vigor traits in a polyhouse and growth chamber under hydroponic conditions. The accessions exhibited significant differences for all traits investigated. Traits showing greatest phenotypic variation were seedling visual score, plant height, shoot fresh weight, shoot dry weight and shoot length. Seed weight exhibited the least variation. Seed weight was significantly correlated with visual seedling score and shoot and seedling fresh and dry weight. Correlation analysis showed that the visual seedling score was a reliable method for estimating seedling vigor in wild barley. The first three principal components (PC) explained 82.3% of the variation present in the WBDC with PC1 (54.0%) associated with shoot fresh weight, shoot dry weight, seedling dry weight, seedling fresh weight, shoot length and seedling length. Accessions from the southwest portion of the Fertile Crescent, like WBDC020 (Turkey), WBDC238 (Jordan) and WBDC244 (Jordan) exhibited the highest positive values for most of the plant vigor traits investigated. These wild barley accessions likely carry alleles that will be useful for the improvement of plant vigor traits in cultivated barley.

¹Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, Korea;

²Department of Food Science, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, Korea;

³Department of Botany, Kohat University of Science & Technology (KUST), Kohat 26000, Pakistan;

⁴Department of Plant Pathology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA;

⁵Division of Biotechnology, Chonbuk National University, Iksan 570-752, Korea;

⁶Department of Crop Science, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, Korea;

^*Corresponding author, E-mail: sjyun@chonbuk.ac.kr

⁺KT and MRP contributed equally to this paper