Full Length Research Paper

Agro-morphological characterization of the Turkish lentil landraces

Faruk Toklu¹*, B. Tuba Biçer² and Tolga Karaköy³

¹Cukurova University, Vocational School of Kozan, Seed Science Programme, 01500 Kozan/Adana, Turkey.

²Dicle University, Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Field Crops, Diyarbakir, Turkey.

³Cukurova Agricultural Research Institute, Dogankent-Adana, Turkey.

*Correspondıng author. E-maıl: fapet@cu.edu.tr Tel: 90 322 5165477-118.

Accepted 10 August, 2009

A collection of lentil landraces comprising 39 genotypes from the south east Anatolia region of Turkey and 7 commercial varieties, were evaluated for 23 (8 qualitative and 15 quantitative) agro-morphological characteristics. A wide range of diversity of almost all of the plant characteristics that were studied was recorded for the lentil genotypes. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed for 12 quantitative traits. The first three principal components accounted for 73.13% of the total variation. PC₁ was positively related to the biological yield, the weight of the pods/plant, the number of the pods/plant, the number of the seeds/plant and the weight of the seeds/plant. PC₂ was closely correlated with the flowering duration, days to maturity and the diameter of the seed and was negatively correlated to days of flowering. PC₃ was positively related to the plant height, the length of the internodes and the protein content and was negatively related to the 100 seed weight. Following the analysis of the agronomic characteristics over the first and second principal components, the lentil landraces formed 4 - 5 different groups.  

Key words: Lentil, landraces, agro-morphological, characterization.