Genetic Variability of Quantitative Traits in Chrysanthemum(Dendranthema morifolium) Cultivars.

In order to study the genetic variation and differences of morphological traits in chrysanthemums genotypes, an experiment was conducted at National Research Station and Ornamental Plants, Mahallat, for four years from 2004 to 2007.The first year was conducted positive selection in attention based on morphological traits and the second, third and fourth years the experiment was arranged in a Randomized Complete Block design with three replications which characteristics were evaluated and now they are measured.There were significant differences among genotypes for days to blooming and flowering, plant height, number of flower per plant, length of leaf, diameter of flower, number of leaf and length of petal, but differences for other traits were not significant in 2005 combined.Results of analysis of variance over three years indicated that genotypes were highly significant only for days to wilting and number of petal row(p≤0.01) and were significant for days to flowering and number of flower per plant(p≤0.05).Traits showed low broadsence heritability(less %30).Most traits the phenotypic coefficient of variation were greater than the genotypic ones, and the differences for most of them were great. The highest phenotypic and genotypic coefficient of variation, were obtained for perid of flowering and weight of plant wet, respectively and the lowest coefficient found for days to blooming and days to flowering. Genotypic and phenotypic correlations among the traits had similar trend and in most cases had little differences.The highest genotypic and phenotypic correlations of positive were obtained between length of leaf and weight of flower dry, diameter of disk and weight of flower dry,wedth of leaf and weight of flower wet. In general, the results of this study indicated that there were small portion of genetic for most of the traits and selection is not effective for their improvement, and must was doing selection for other traits such as resistance to diseases and pests and colour of petals. Key word : Chrysanthemum, phenotypic and genotypic coefficient, broadsence heritability and selection