Breeding barley for quality in Turkey

Abstract

We evaluated a total of 411 genotypes, including 334 breeding lines with 77 checks from Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Breeding Program of Turkey (BBPT), based upon their grain yield (GY) and quality traits (namely protein content-PC, acid detergent fiber-ADF, thousand kernel weight-TKW, kernel size-KS and test weight-TW), during the 5 consecutive cropping seasons, from 2007-2008 to 2011-2012. Broad-sense heritability (H) values for quality traits were moderate (0.57-0.65), while it was low (0.43) for grain yield. Accordingly, grain physical features (namely TW, KS and TKW) were positively significantly correlated with GY, but negatively significantly correlated with PC. Results of our study showed that selection for GY and quality traits was less efficient than we expected, due to undesirable multi-variate correlations such as GY vs PC and low to moderate H values. Therefore, we tried to put suggestions forward to the BBPT, by following discussing about our ability to select for high GY and acceptable quality in barley.