Instability of the expression of morphological and phenological descriptors to environmental variation in white oat

Abstract

Morphological and phenological characters are used in the selection, breeding, and description of plant varieties with varying genotypes. The stability of these descriptors in the face of environmental changes can determine their usefulness in situations where plant varieties must be reliably identified. The objective of this study was to verify the expression of morphological and phenological descriptors and use them to distinguish between white oat cultivars (Avena sativa L.) in two growing periods. For this, five cultivars, protected and belonging to four breeders, referred to as G1, G2, G3, G4, and G5, were sown in the typical growing season in southern Brazil (autumn-winter) and outside that period (winter-spring), and grown for forty days. The experiment was established in the field, in a randomized block design replicated three times. The cultivars were evaluated for 42 descriptors (15 quantitative and 27 qualitative). Quantitative data were analyzed by analysis of variance, the comparison of averages, and multivariate analysis by generating average euclidean distances. Qualitative data were analyzed by mode determination, followed by obtaining the similarity index. The relationship between cultivars was illustrated by dendrograms. The stability index for each descriptor was calculated. A genotype x environment interaction was observed for 28 descriptors. The stability of descriptor appearance and persistence over the growing season was higher in qualitative (44%) than in quantitative (7%) descriptors. The most stable qualitative descriptors were lemma color, hairiness of the upper node, flag leaf position, hairiness of the base of the grain, basal grain length, and rachilla length. The most stable quantitative descriptor was flag leaf length. Shifting the white oat growing season from autumn-winter to winter-spring reduced the cycle and modified the expression of most descriptors by changing the phenotypic distinctness between cultivars.