Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agronomy, Vol. LVIII
Written by Gabriel Florin ANTON, Maria JOIŢA-PĂCUREANU, Aliona CUCEREAVII

Sunflower is a very important crop in the world agriculture. Taking into consideration the high seed yield and oil yield, thanks to the extension of sunflower cultivated varieties and hybrids having a high oil content, this crop has a good place in the hierarchy of dominant crops over the world. Genetic resources may be used as initial germplasm for obtaining new sunflower inbred lines or as genes donor sources for the value increasing of some lines. Sunflower wild species are the most rich and varied source of favorable genes for the important characteristics of cultivated species. Sunflower interspecific hybrids are very important in breeding, thanks to a very good genetic variability. As the result of our research work, we have obtained many interspecific populations, after crossingsunflower wild species Helianthus argophyllus with Helianthus annuus cultivated variety Record. There have been studied different characteristics, in two years of experiments for the wild species, for the cultivated variety and for the interspecific populations. Observations regarding flowering duration and vegetation period were recorded. There have been analyzed different morphological characteristics (plant height, number of leaves, petiole length, head diameter, seed wide, seed length, and number of branch) as well as other characteristics, including the seed oil content. Regarding the resistance of the hybrid populations and of the parental lines to the pathogen Phomopsis helianthi and the parasite Orobanche cumana, it was found that, after 5 generations of self pollination, some hybrid populations presented good resistance to the tested pathogens and parasites. The data obtained during the experiments has shown that in the most cases, the differences referring to the cultivated sunflower are statistically significant. Similar results were obtained with the hybrid populations for all analyzed characteristics.

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