Abstract

Wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) is the ancestral species of cultivated tetraploid wheat with AABB genomes. Because of its full interfertility with domesticated emmer wheat, this wild species can serve as one of the most important genetic resources to improve durum as well as bread wheat. The geographical distribution area of wild emmer wheat covers the Fertile Crescent in South-west Asia from Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran. Wild emmer wheat is found in the open park forest of Quercus species and also abundant in habitats with rocky basalt soils. A number of studies on the accesions of wild emmer wheat from some locations out of the Turkey have reported the genetic diversity at the macro- and micro-geographic levels and its correlations with allelic diversity at allozyme or DNA marker loci such as microsatellites in the nuclear genome, but there is not any study on the accesions of wild emmer wheat from Turkey. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to document the phenotypic and genotypic diversity between and within 176 accessions of 38 populations of wild emmer wheat