Selection of basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) full-sib families from diverse landraces

Publication date: Available online 16 January 2019Source: Journal of Applied Research on Medicinal and Aromatic PlantsAuthor(s): Gholam A. Akbari, Sahar Binesh, Hossein Ramshini, Elias Soltani, Fatemeh Amini, Marieh S. MirfazeliAbstractBasil (Ocimum basilicum L.) is one of the most important culinary and aromatic plants in Iran. Surprisingly, no commercial cultivar is available across the country and farmers are cultivating landraces. The main purpose of the present study was to describe the diversity among and within landraces of sweet basil as well as developing new genotypes for cultivar development. Twenty two genotypes of basil including Iranian landraces and international cultivars were evaluated in a randomized complete block design with three replications in 2017. Three Iranian landraces, ‘Isfahan3’, ‘Birjand’ and ‘Malayer’ were recognized as superior landraces. Dry herb for them was recorded as 3309, 3191 and 3175 kg ha−1, respectively. Also, the content of essential oil in ‘Isfahan3’, ‘Birjand’ and ‘Malayer’ was obtained as 1.43, 1.85, and 1.79% (w/w on dry weight basis), respectively. Due to existence of high diversity among landraces, broad-sense heritability estimates were over 98% for all of the evaluated traits. Among these landraces, 14 full-sib families were produced via controlled pollination. In another experiment the full-sib families were compared. For all measured traits, there were highly significant differences among full-...

Source: Journal of Applied Research on Medicinal and Aromatic Plants - January 16, 2019 Category: Complementary Medicine Source Type: research