Plant adaptation to environmental conditions is crucial for the success of crops. Landraces are a valuable resource for the improvement of crop adaptation. For instance, barley landraces outperform modern cultivars at low-productivity sites (Yahiaoui et al. 2014), likely due to a better ability to fill the grain under stressful conditions. Landraces usually show large genotype-by-environment interaction as a result of local adaptation. Besides they usually show a wide genetic diversity that is easily transferable to breeding programs. In this work we evaluated a collection of Spanish durum obtained from CRF-INIA to determinate their potential in breeding. In this work we performed a preliminary evaluation of a durum wheat collection kindly provided by CRF-INIA. This collection consisted of 159 genotypes and it included the durum wheat collection developed by Ruiz et al. (2013) along with durum wheat accessions originally collected from southern Spain. reliminary assessment included heading date, plant height and yield in order to get a first evaluation of their potential for durum wheat breeding. Most accessions were outside the recommended heading date for our conditions. Spikes of the majority of accessions emerged later than the latest control with delays between 1 and 25 days. Only five accessions showed heading days values below 129 days after sowing. Similarly only 8 accessions were below 1m tall which resulted in a variable degree of lodging. The most promising accessions were selected for in the current growing season.

Research funded by Grant PP. AVA.AVA.201601.17 from IFAPA (Agricultural and Fishery Research and Training Institute), Junta de Andalucía, Spain including FEDER funding. All authors are members of FiRCMe Network, funded by MINECO (AGL2016-81855-REDT).

Trabajo presentado en el I Simposio Español de Fisiología y Mejora de Cereales, celebrado en Zaragoza el 9 y 10 de abril de 2018.