Morphological and molecular characterization of hulled wheats

摘要

The emmer wheat is one of the most cultivated hulled wheat in the Mediterranean basin. In Italy, it is cultivated mainly in marginal lands of Central and Southern Italy, where local varieties, adapted to the natural environments where they have originated, are used. Emmer cultivation was drastically reduced during the end of last century due to its low yield. Nevertheless, more recently its agronomic advantage, nutritive values and its use in dietary products, made its cultivation economically interesting in marginal lands with a parallel increasing of the cultivated area which overpass the 2000 ha. In the present paper, Italian accessions of Triticum turgidum L. spp. dicoccum Shrank ex Schiibler (emmer wheat) have been evaluated for agro-morphological traits in field trials in central Italy and at the DNA level utilizing ESTs as molecular markers. The analysed materials have shown distinctive molecular traits and the existence of a huge amount of diversity between varieties. The molecular markersare able to cluster the accessions in agreement with some of their characteristics.