Variation of agronomic traits among introduced winter bread wheat cultivars

Five Romanian and eight Serbian cultivars were evaluated in the conditions of South Bulgaria for nine agronomic traits. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) permitted to group the cultivars in two main clusters divided each one in three sub-clusters. The most distant, according to the complex of studied characters, were the cultivars Gruia and Rusiya and the closest ones Gruia and Litera, Faur and Boema, Evropa 90 and Gora. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) allowed identifying cultivars of potential interest as parental lines for further use in winter bread wheat breeding, as Boema (short stem, high number of grains per spike), Gora (high grain lysine content) and Rusiya (high number of spikelets per spike and thousand kernel weight).