YIELD STRUCTURE ELEMENTS OF LEAFY AND LEAFLESS PEA SAMPLES: VARIABILITY, CORRELATION AND PROSPECTS OF THEIR USE IN THE BREEDING PROCESS

To select highly productive peas genotypes it is essential to know the patterns of plant productivity, depending on the combination of structural elements. The purpose of this work was to study the variability of yield structure elements, to identify the correlation between them, and to study the influence of yield structure elements on seed productivity in collection samples of peas with different types of leaf. The studies were conducted on the experimental fields of the laboratory of legumes breeding and seed-growing of the FSBSI “Agricultural Research Center “Donskoy” (Rostov region, Zernograd) in 2017–2018. The objects of research were 58 leafy and 69 leafless samples of various ecological and geographical origin from the world collection of the All-Russian Research Institute named after N.I. Vavilov and samples identified by other research institutions in Russia and abroad. The studies on the variability and correlation of the yield elements of leafy and leafless pea samples have shown that ‘number of kernels per plant’ and ‘kernel weight per plant’ are most variable traits. There has been identified the difference in interconnection among leafy and leafless samples. No-effect of plant height and lower nod location on productivity allows breeding short-stem pea samples and samples with high attachment of a lower nod of both pea types without reducing their productivity