Abstract
One hundred and two barley accessions and five checks were evaluated using augmented design consisting of four complete blocks in 2012 main cropping season at holetta agricultural research center. Ten quantitative and six qualitative characters were recorded. Analysis of variance showed significant difference (p 3000. Phenotypic diversity was very high for kernel row number (H′=0.99), grain color (H′=0.90) and spike attitude (H′=0.85) and low for lemma color (H′=0.48). Days to flowering, days to maturity and numbers of seed per spike, from quantitative characters and kernel row number, grain color and spike attitude from qualitative characters were the most characters which contributed variances among accessions. Key words: Cluster analysis, diversity index, principal component analysis, qualitative characters, quantitative characters.
Highlights
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is an annual cereal crop which belongs to the genus Hordeum in the TribeTriticeace of grass family Poaceae which contains about350 wild species (Amanda, 2008)
Barley is a major crop, grown worldwide and in a wide range of climatic conditions; despite its importance as a crop species, little is known about the population genetics of barley and the effects of bottlenecks, adaptation, and gene flow on genetic diversity within and between landrace populations (Leino and Jenny, 2010; Tanto et al, 2010)
The Shannon-Weaver diversity index (H′) was used to compute the phenotypic frequencies to assess the phenotypic diversity for each character for all accessions, based on qualitative traits
Summary
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is an annual cereal crop which belongs to the genus Hordeum in the TribeTriticeace of grass family Poaceae which contains about350 wild species (Amanda, 2008). Hordeum spontaneum over 10,000 years ago (Badr et al., 2000; Blattner and Badani, 2001; Grando and Helena, 2005; Azhaguvel and Komatsuda, 2007; Dai et al, 2012). Ethiopia is an important primary and secondary gene center for many field crop species, including barley, which were introduced centuries ago and since adapted and developed wide genetic diversity (Abdi, 2011) The crop successfully grows in the arid climates of the Sahara, the Tibetan plateaus, the highlands of the Himalayas, and the Andean countries, the tropical plains of India and the mountains of Ethiopia (Grando and Helena, 2005).
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