the study of phenological and morphophysiological traits of new and old barely shoot cultivars

in order to compare morphophysiological traits between new and old cultivars of barley (hordeum vulgare l.) a greenhouse experiment was conducted in greenhouse condition in faculty of agriculture, ferdowsi university of mashhad in spring and summer 2011.the type of experiment was a completely randomized design with eight treatments (nosrat , youssof , fagr30 , nick) and four old cultivars include (reihan, kavir, zarjo , valfajr) and three replications. all seeds were grown in pvc tubes contained washed sands and disruptive sampling was occurred with destroying plastic bags in the end of the four stages uncluding 6th leaf stage, jointing, heading and ripening. results indicated that new cultivars showed better performances in all shoot growth parameters than the old cultivars. modern cultivars for most traits, particularly traits that were positively correlated with yield and its components proved more successful than the old cultivars. they had longer reproductive periods and grain filling duration but their vegetative period were shorter than old cultivars. among shoots characteristics, new cultivars had higher leaf area, stem dry weight and stem length than old cultivars. result of this study showed that, among all the characteristics of grain yield and yield components, such as grain weight ,spike length, spike per plant, grain per spike and number tiller , new figures were better than old figures. in general, new cultivar nick was introduced as the best cultivar and zarjo was introduced as the weakest cultivar.