Characterization of different pepper genotypes and low temperature tolerance

In this study, morphological characterization of 562 pepper genotypes that were collected to be used in pepper breeding and selfed 6 times was performed. SAS and NTSYSpc statistical package programs were used for statistical analysis of morphological characterization data. A subset of collection that includes 96 genotypes was formed as a result of analysis. Mean similarity co-efficient of pepper genotypes was found to be 0.44, 0.42, 0.41, 0.37, 0.45 and 0.42 for sivri, charleston, paprika, Kahramanmaraş-Şanlıurfa, chile and dolma respectively. The first three Eigen values explained the total variation 30% evaluating 53 morphological properties with Principal Component Analysis (PCA). It increases to 50% percent when 25 uncorrelated morphological properties were used. The results of PCA showed that, dolma and paprika pepper genotypes form separate groups while sivri and charleston genotypes intersect. Although chile pepper genotypes form a separate group, some of its members are placed in Kahramanmaraş and sivri pepper groups. Paprika pepper group is located between sivri-charleston groups and dolma group. 95% of total combinations were found to be independent from each other when the correlation matrix was formed with the 25 morphological properties. This increases the possibility of that 25 morphological properties that defines genetic variance are located (n= 12) different chromosomes of pepper and even in different arm. Morphological properties of blossom and fruit set time reveal a close link with a correlation coefficient of 0.9966. The collection is formed from 16 sivri, 11 charleston, 11 paprika, 9 Kahramanmaraş-Şanlıurfa, 9 dolma and 10 chile pepper in adddition to 10 sensitive, 10 moderately tolerant and 10 tolerant genotypes that were selected evaluating the results of low temperature screening. Polen germination test after the low tempture treatment explained 74% of the variation (R2=0.74) in separating sensitive, moderately tolerant and tolerant pepper genotypes. While Alata-195 genotypes showed the lowest tolerance to low temperature the highest tolerance was observed from Alata-111. Keywords: Pepper, characterization, low temperature, tolerance