Breeding for Improved Allelopatic Activity in Swedish Spring Wheat

Abstract

Spring wheat is less competitive against weeds than is rye, oat or barley. This is probably an effect of less vigorous growth early in spring, but allelopathy may also be involved. In a screening of more than 800 different genotypes from a world collection, Swedish cultivars both, old and new, showed low allelopathic activity against rye grass (Lollium perenne L.) if compared with e.g. barley or even most of the foreign wheat cultivars. Two foreign wheat cultivars were identified to be as allelopathic as the most allelopathic Swedish barleys and are now used in a breeding program. Since the cultivars are not adapted to Swedish conditions several steps, involving crossings and back-crossings followed by repeatedly allelopathy selections, are therefore needed to recover the originally high quality wheat but with higher allelopathic properties. From a breeding point of view it is important, at an early stage, to evaluate how important allelopathy is for the weed competitive ability. Therefore, in 2007, four breeding lines (not completely stable and only back-crossed once) were studied in an organic yield trial together with the Swedish parent and other advanced normal breeding lines. As in most studies including weeds standard errors are rather high, but still genotypic differences in weed biomass could be observed. Interestingly, the only single trait found to be correlated with the differences in weed biomass was the allelopathic activity measured as the root growth inhibition of ryegrass. Neither early biomass growth nor early plant height or straw length was correlated with weed biomass. These first field data indicate that it is feasible to breed for improved weed suppression by selecting allelopathic activity. Hopefully new field trials in the summer of 2008 will confirm this statement. The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) is acknowledged for funding this research

Keywords

Allelopathy; wheat; weed competition

Published in

Title: Proceedings of the 5th World Congress on Allelopathy
Publisher: International Allelopathy Society

Conference

5th World Congress on Allelopathy

SLU Authors

• Bertholdsson, Nils-Ove

  • Department of Plant Breeding, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Agricultural Science


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/20236