Evaluation of new Turkish apricot genetic resources from the Irano-Caucasian eco-geographical group

Abstract

This study presents 19 characters of 86 apricot cultivars and genotypes of the Irano- Caucasian eco-geographical group evaluated using principal component analysis. The high variability and differences among the apricot genotypes in terms of morphological, phenological and fruit quality traits were defined. The fruit size of the genotypes was generally very small (9.3 %) or small (43.0 %), the total rate of big and very big fruit genotypes was only 16.3%. The data showed that 90.1 % of the genotypes had yellow ground fruit colour, 88.4% had sweet kernel and 65% had firmness ?5 kg/cm2. About half of the apricot genotypes have 20% or high total soluble solids content. Most of the genotypes (67.3%) were harvested in mid-season and other genotypes (23.3%) were harvested early, while 4.7% of them were harvested very late, 3.5 % of the genotypes late. Only one genotype (1.2%) was harvested very early. The fruit size was highly correlated with fruit weight, pit weight and fruit flesh/pit rate. The same correlation was also observed between the fruit ground colour and fruit flesh colour. On the other hand, the total soluble solids were moderately correlated with fruit flesh firmness and seed taste. The results of the principal component analysis show that the 55% of the total variation is represented for the first three main components (22.9, 19.8, and 12.3%, respectively). The germplasm presented a large variation in the evaluated characters and most of the genotypes were found having high total soluble solids and low titratable acidity which would be beneficial for future breeding programs held to improve the related characters.