Genetic diversity of spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) landraces collected in Iran using some morphological traits

Abstract

Spinach has become an important vegetable crop in most regions of the world and remarkable changes in production amounts have occurred in the past decades due to demand increase in many countries. Fifty-four spinach landraces collected from diverse geographical regions of Iran were evaluated for several qualitative and quantitative traits. Landraces indicated a high variability for measured morphologic characteristics regarding results of variance analysis and descriptive statistics. The first three factors of factors analysis explained 76.8% of variation of spinach landraces. The first extracted factor can be regarded as a leaf property vector; the extracted second factor could be named as yield vector and the third factor was female plants percent vector. The dendrogram of cluster analysis generated from genotypes distance matrices showed that in a distance linkage of 800, the 54 spinach landraces could be agglomerated into sixteen clusters. The number of clusters was verified by multivariate analysis of variance test through Wilks' Lambda statistics. Some spinach landraces such as G10 G13, G38 and G41 were individual cluster and were not similar to the other collected genotypes while some of the spinach landraces were similar to each other and grouped as one cluster such as cluster 9 (C9). The cluster C14 (landrace Karaj 2) was the most favorable genotype due to good performance for most measured quantitative traits. This landrace could be recommended for commercial release after complementary experiments. Also, landraces G1 (Arak) and G3 (Urmia) indicate good potential regarding the measured traits. These landraces could be used directly as commercial cultivars or introduced in spinach breeding programs.