Agro-morphological characterization of the Turkish lentil landraces

A collection of lentil landraces comprising 39 genotypes from the south east Anatolia region of Turkey and 7 commercial varieties, were evaluated for 23 (8 qualitative and 15 quantitative) agro-morphological characteristics. A wide range of diversity of almost all of the plant characteristics that were studied was recorded for the lentil genotypes. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed for 12 quantitative traits. The first three principal components accounted for 73.13% of the total variation. PC1 was positively related to the biological yield, the weight of the pods/plant, the number of the pods/plant, the number of the seeds/plant and the weight of the seeds/plant. PC2 was closely correlated with the flowering duration, days to maturity and the diameter of the seed and was negatively correlated to days of flowering. PC3 was positively related to the plant height, the length of the internodes and the protein content and was negatively related to the 100 seed weight. Following the analysis of the agronomic characteristics over the first and second principal components, the lentil landraces formed 4 - 5 different groups.