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

Shanjida Rahman, Shahidul Islam (), Eviatar Nevo, Md Atik Us Saieed, Qier Liu, Rajeev Kumar Varshney and Wujun Ma
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Shanjida Rahman: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia
Shahidul Islam: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia
Eviatar Nevo: Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel
Md Atik Us Saieed: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia
Qier Liu: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia
Rajeev Kumar Varshney: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia
Wujun Ma: Food Future’s Institute, School of Health, Education & Environment, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-23

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

Keywords: wild emmer; diversity; shoot morphological traits; multivariate analysis; wheat improvement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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