Barley landraces harbor significantly higher genetic diversity than modern cultivars. Diversity of agronomic and morphological traits was investigated for 386 accessions of Korean landrace barley which were back-introduced from Okayama University, Japan. Among the accessions, 279 were covered barley and 89 naked barley. Seeds were sowed in late October and major growth characteristics were investigated at maturity and after harvest. The traits evaluated exhibited higher variation with respect to the CV, ranging from 47 to 60. The trait exhibiting the greatest variation was flag leaf width (FLW, CV=60 with 2.8x difference between minimum 0.6 and maximum 1.7). Those traits exhibiting least variation were heading date (HD, CV=47.2 with 31 days difference between the earliest and the latest) and seed number per spike (SNS, CV= 48.9 with 2.8x difference between minimum 36 and maximum 72). The other eight traits [maturity date (MD, CV= 53.7), culm length (CL, CV= 55.4), flag leaf length (FLL, CV= 51.6), spike length (SL, CV= 54.3), awn length (AL, CV= 54.4), whole spike length (WSL, CV= 52.9), spike density (SD, CV= 52.7), seed rows of spike (SRS, CV= 50.1)] were intermediate in their level of variation with respect to the CV. The first, second and third principal components explained about 30.3%, 17.0% and 13.4% of the total variation of the traits, respectively. The traits which contributed more positively to PC1 were SL, SD, WSL and AL. The traits which contributed more positively to PC2 were SRS and SNS, and those contributed more positively to PC3 were FLL and FLW. The Korean landrace barley accessions contain significantly diverse variation to explore for the improvement of agronomic and morphological traits of current elite cultivars. This work was supported by a grant from Regional Subgenebank Support Program of Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea.

• Hyo-Jeong Lee(Chonbuk National University)
• Tae-Il Park(Department of Rice and Winter Creal Crop)
• Jung Hoon Kang(National Institute of Crop Science)
• Song Joong Yun(Chonbuk National University) Corresponding author