Breeding value of naked-oat genotypes in terms of a set of utility characteristics

To determine dependence patterns, we studied a collection comprising 45 naked-oat accessions of different ecological, geographical and genetic origins. To assess the accessions for a set of investigated characters, cluster analysis was conducted. The cluster analysis distinguished four groups of accessions according to the panicle performance constituents. The accessions of clusters one and two were identified as valuable starting materials for naked-oat breeding to create high-yielding cultivars suitable for cultivation in the Eastern Left-Bank Forest-Steppe of Ukraine. The selected naked-oat accessions in clusters one and two are valuable for further breeding because they exhibit altered correlations between plant height, panicle performance, and the number of kernels per panicle. The correlations between panicle performance and plant height, and between the number of kernels per panicle and plant height, are negative in these clusters (r= −0.41 and r= −0.41, respectively), unlike the correlations in the entire studied collection, where these traits were positively correlated or were hardly correlated (r= 0.42 and r= 0.19, respectively). The selected accessions are characterised by the following features: the plant height of 78.5–86.2 cm, the panicle length of 16.9–18.8 cm, 33.5–39.2 spikelets per panicle, 47.3–52.4 kernels per panicle, the weight of kernels per panicle of 1.2–1.3 g, and the thousand-kernel weight of 27.0–27.3 g.