Characterizing Agronomic and Shoot Morphological Diversity across 263 Wild Emmer Wheat Accessions

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