Principle Component Analysis, Correlation and Path Coefficients in Wild Wheat Aegilops

Abstract

 A field experiment was conducted in two differnt locations (Al Ghab research centre and Al-Swaida research center, Syria) during the season 2015-2016 examining five wild wheat of Aegilops genotypes. Two genotypes belong to Aegilops.triuncialis, two genotypes belong to Aegilops.ovata and two genotypes belong to Aegilops. biuncialis, in addition to two local checks sham3 and sham5 which were all obtained from genetic resources section in GCSAR. Randomized Complete Block Design RCBD was implemented with three replications, Traits of (days to maturity, spike number per plant, leaf area, awn length, spike length, spike peduncle length, grain number per spike, thousand grain weight, grain yield per plant) were studied. Principle component analysis was carried out in order to portioning the total variance into principle components. Correlation analysis and path coefficient analysis between studied traits and grain yield were applied to obtain direct and indirect effects and to define their contribution (%) in grain yield to identify the selection criteria for grain yield. Results showed a positive significant correlation between grain yield and traits of leaf area, awn length, spike length, spike peduncle length, grain number per spike and thousand grain weight (0.827**, 0.762**, 0.433**, 0.545**, 0.728**, 0.508**) respectively. Principle component analysis results indicated that there are two components (PC1, PC2) explain 77.3% of variance between the studied genotypes. Results of path coefficient analysis showed that the direct effects of leaf area, awn length and thousand grain weight were positive and statistically significant (0.7254, 0.3446, 0.3154) respectively. The overall contribution of the studied traits in grain yield 91%. In summary, using these traits especially (leaf area, awn length and thousand grain weight) as selection criteria is preferred direction when breeding for high yield potential.

Key Words: Principle Component, Correlation, Path coeffi