Leyla Hoseinzadeh; Alireza Salami; Mohsen Ebrahimi; Ali Izady
Abstract
Objective: Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is a perennial, sterile, and triploid plant. Moreover, dried saffron stigmas have many uses in the food and medicine industry. Saffron plants propagate by corms due to sterility. Therefore, it has limited diversity and a poor plant breeding background, leading to ...
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Objective: Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is a perennial, sterile, and triploid plant. Moreover, dried saffron stigmas have many uses in the food and medicine industry. Saffron plants propagate by corms due to sterility. Therefore, it has limited diversity and a poor plant breeding background, leading to genetic erosion. As a result, being under severe risk of genetic erosion is an obstacle to the breeding and production of saffron. The objective of this study was to investigate the diversity among saffron ecotypes, to evaluate the correlation between morphological traits and the amounts of secondary metabolites, and to classify the ecotypes.
Methods: A complete randomized block design with two replications in three harvests has been conducted to investigate the biological diversity of 22 saffron accessions collected from different regions of Iran at the Tehran University research farm, Mohamadshahr, Alborz, Iran. The most important morphological traits and amount of secondary metabolites, including crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal, were measured by using high-performance liquid chromatography.
Results: Analysis of variance showed significant differences among accessions for studied traits in three consecutive harvests. Qaenat accession had the highest means of obtaining the most morphological characteristics. The factor analysis based on PCA showed that the two first components explained 97 percent of the total variance of traits. The traits of leaf length, stigma fresh weight, stigma length, and safranal in the first component and picrocrocin, crocin, and petal length in the second component had the most positive role in justifying 66.7 percent of the total variance, respectively. Based on cluster analysis, accessions were divided into five clusters. The Qaenat and Firdos 16 accessions had the most genetic similarity, and the Qaenat and Arak accessions had the farthest genetic distance. Moreover, the studied traits are divided into three clusters, so that the amount of crocin and picrocrocin and petal length are in the first category, the amount of safranal, the length of leaf, length of stigma and length of flower, fresh weight of flower and stigma are in the second category, and the final yield, the total number of flowers, and dry weight of stigma are in the third category.
Conclusion: Although studied accessions were cultivated and preserved in the same geographical environment, they had significant differences at morphological and phytochemical levels. Therefore, it can be concluded that the origin of the observed diversity is the result of the existence of diversity at the genome, transcriptome, or epigenome levels.
Reyhaneh Pishkam Rad; Ali Izadi Darbandi; Maryam Shahbazi; Mehdi Fazel Najaf-Abadi; Hamid Reza Nikkhah; Raha Abedini; Morteza Barati
Abstract
In order to study the reaction of barley genotypes to drought, an experiment was conducted in a factorialdesign based on CRD for two wild ecotypes and four crop genotypes of barley in greenhouse. In thisstudy, the barley genotypes and wild ecotypes as the first factor and irrigation treatment with three ...
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In order to study the reaction of barley genotypes to drought, an experiment was conducted in a factorialdesign based on CRD for two wild ecotypes and four crop genotypes of barley in greenhouse. In thisstudy, the barley genotypes and wild ecotypes as the first factor and irrigation treatment with three levelsinclude 70 percent of water holding capacity of soil, 30 and 10 percent as the second factor wereconsidered as treatments. Analysis of growth and other morphological characteristics such as tillers, plantheight and leaf number and leaf area per plant and some physiological characteristics including therelative water content, leaf chlorophyll content, osmotic potential, osmotic adjustment, stomatalconductance, canopy temperature in each three treatments were measured. Analysis of variance showedthat the effect of drought on all traits and differences between genotypes were significant. Results ofcorrelation revealed that there is a significant and direct relationship between relative water content withosmotic potential and percentage of dried material. Path analysis identified that osmotic potential had themost direct effect on died material. The 41-1 and Morocco genotypes showed greater sensitivity thanother genotypes to the applied stress.