Status of the National Chickpea Collection in Bulgaria

Abstract

The National Gene Bank at the Institute of Plant Genetic Resources, Sadovo maintains 310 accessions of chickpeas, 203 of which - are under long-term storage and the other 107 - as a working collection. Some of them are introduced from Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and the U.S., but significant numbers are received from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Syria, and from Plant Production Institute” V. Ja. Jurjev” UAAS, Ukraine. The indigenous accessions (Bulgarian origin) constitute a small part of the collection - 50 accessions. They are represented by old populations, newly selected varieties, and lines. For Bulgaria, chickpea is not a particularly important crop and the breeding is quite limited. One of the major features of the chickpea collection is the high phenotypic variation. Usually, accessions dominate with uniimparipinnate leaves compared to those with simple and mutipinnate leaves. The color of the flowers also varies widely: white, pink, red, purple, and blue. There are accessions in the collection with fawn, cream, and black color of the seed, with variable shapes and sizes. The biggest part of the collection is the early ripen accessions (95%) which fully realize their biological potential under the climate conditions of Southern Bulgaria. The correlation coefficient presented showed that the number of seeds per plant, and total number of branches were positively and highly significant (P< 0.01) with the weight of seeds per plant. However, the weight of 100 seeds was negatively correlated with plant height, plant height, total number of branches, number of seeds per plant, number of seeds per pod, and weight of seeds per plan. Several chickpea breeding lines (36), sown in November, were field tested for cold resistance. Some of them seemed to possess this trait. The same accessions were tested in a frost chamber of temperature -5°C and -10°C for 24 hours. At -5°C only two accessions (A800602 and A800606) expressed this trait. At -10°C all tested materials died.