No abstract

The study was undertaken with the objective to examine the nature and to quantify the magnitude of genotype x environment interaction effects on soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] grain yield and to determine the winning genotype (s) for test environments in north western Ethiopia. The experiment was executed at four different locations of Ethiopia for two consecutive years (2007 and 2008) using thirty two genotypes including two checks. Randomized complete block design with three replicates was employed. The combined analysis of variance over environments explained soybean grain yield was significantly (p<0.001) affected by environments (25.58%), genotypes (14.87%) and genotype x environment interaction (59.55%). The result depicted differential performance of soybean genotypes at different test environments and hence the interaction was crossover type. The genotype main effect plus genotype x environment interaction (GGE) biplots were applied to analyze and visualize pattern of the interaction component. The first two principal components (PC1 and PC2) of the GGE explained 63.4% with PC1=41.6 and PC2=21.8 of the GGE sum of squares using environment standardized model. Genotypes, G13 (TGX-1998-29F), G3 (TGX-849-313D), and G7 (TGX-1889-29F) combined both high mean yield and high stability performance across the test environments and could be characterized as an ideal genotypes.

Barley is a major cereal grown widely and used in several food products, beverage production and animal feed. Being the fourth most important cereal crop in the world and the fifth rank in Ethiopia, it is a cash crop and used as a source of malt by the brewery industries, as food for human and feed for animals. Genetic diversity assessment is a key component in breeding programs. High level of polymorphism, codominant and multi allelic nature of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) markers make them preferable for diversity analysis in plant species. In this study, 22 SSRs markers were used to characterize the genetic diversity of 39 released and elite barley varieties collected from barley breeding program in Ethiopia. The amplification of SSRs loci were obtained for 35 primer pairs and only 22 of them showed clear polymorphic patterns which produced a total of 73 alleles with an average of 5 alleles per locus. The data generated by these informative primers were sufficient to discriminate the analysed barley genotypes. Based on the dissimilarity matrices ranging from 0.11 to 0.58, the genotypes were grouped into three major groups. The calculated polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranges from 0.17 to 0.60 with an average of 0.47 which shows the importance of the markers for future diversity analysis of barley. Locus HVACL1 and HVM36 shows higher PIC and locus HVBDHN7 shows lower PIC in this characterized barley genotype. This result will be useful for barley germplasm management and improvement in terms of biodiversity protection and design of new crosses for future breeding purpose.