EVALUATION OF WHEAT LANDRACES AND MODERN CULTIVERS FOR MORPHO YIELD TRAITS

Abstract

The current research was conducted with the objective to estimate agronomic traits of wheat landraces and modern cultivars the heritability, variability among different agronomic characters in bread wheat genotypes in wheat Triticum aestivum L. Total of 36 advance wheat lines were evaluated in an alpha lattice design with two replications during 2025-26 at Cereal Crop Research Institute (CCRI), Pirsabak Nowshera Pakistan. Analysis of variance revealed significant differences among genotypes for majority of the traits. The study evaluated 36 advanced wheat lines for various agronomic traits, including days to heading, days to maturity, plant height, and spikelets per spike, 1000-grain weight and biological yield. Analysis of variance revealed significant differences among genotypes for most traits. High heritability was observed for traits like biological yield (0.99) and plant height (0.97) indicating strong genetic control and potential for improvement through selective breeding. Minimum values of days to heading, days to maturity and plant height is preferred in wheat breeding programs. Minimum desirable values for days to heading (104) were recorded for Gulzar-19 while minimum days maturity (141) were reported for Khaista- 17, Pirsabak-15 and khyber-23. Similarly, minimum desirable plant height (54cm) was observed for wheat land race i.e. Land-85. Moreover, maximum spikelets per spike (25.35) was noted for Land-85, while maximum thousand grain weight (56.85g) were recorded for modern wheat cultivars Abaseen-21 and Khaista-17, respectively. Likewise, maximum biological yield (15075.08 kg/ha) was reported for wheat genotypes Land-96. Wheat cultivar Abaseen-21 produced maximum grain yield i.e. 5321 kg/ha. For all the studied traits genetic variance was greater than environmental variance which indicated the greater role of genetic effects than environmental impacts. High heritability was observed for traits for all studied parameters, indicating strong genetic control and potential for improvement through selective breeding. Overall, different genotypes showed best performance for different studied traits, therefore these genotypes could be used for improving specific trait in wheat breeding programs