Determination of Traits Effective on Seed Yield of 36 Lines of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) in Northwest Provinces of Iran in Dryland Conditions

In most of the developing countries, legume plants are the main supply of protein. Since some of these crops are adapted with dry land farming, but their yield potential is almost low. To access high yielding lines in northwest provinces of Iran, an experiment was conducted with 36 chickpea lines in 2003-2004 cropping season in 6 × 6 squared lattice in Zanjan, West Azerbaijan (W.A) and Kurdistan provinces. During the experiment, traits such as days of flowering, days of maturity, plant height, 100 seed weight and yield were recorded. After separate analysis of variance, significant differences were found in the yield of studied lines. For Zanjan line no. 26, for W.A. line no.32 and for Kurdestan line no.30 were selected. For location results, experimental data were analyzed through combined analysis of variance with SAS 8. Significant differences were found among genotypes and genotype × location. The mean data over 3 locations was calculated and in addition to simple correlation, these coefficients were partitioned to direct and indirect effects. PCA analysis extracted two components which totally explained 77.23 percent of observed variations. According to this, among the traits, days of flowering and days of maturity had the largest direct effects on yield. Then with cluster analysis, studied lines were classified into 3 groups. Cluster 1 members had the most genetic distance with cluster 3, therefore considering the purpose, selection of lines from these clusters as parents for hybridization, complementary traits of parents and their maximum variations can be used in breeding programs.