EVALUATION OF SUNFLOWER SELF-FERTILITY UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE KULUNDA STEPPE

In the Kulunda steppe, sunflower yields are greatly in-fluenced by empty shells as a result of low self-fertility of plants under unfavorable conditions for pollination. There-fore, the development of sunflower varieties for high self-fertility is a topical issue. To determine self-fertility, it is necessary to take into account the number of tubiform flo-rets in the anthodium, and counting them is a rather labor-intensive task. Therefore,in order to facilitate the determi-nation of self-fertility, the possibility of its evaluation by direct counting of seeds in an anthodium was studied. The experiments were carried out from 2015 through 2018 in the fields of the Plant Breeding and Seed Production La-boratory of the Kulunda Agricultural Experimental Station of the Federal Altai Scientific Center of Agro-Biotechnologies. The research targets were self-pollinated offspring of the 1st-4th inbreeding generations obtained on the basis of large-fruited varieties Baloven, Altai and Kulundinsky 1 under the conditions of the Kulunda steppe of the Altai Region. The results of the experiment show that the self-fertility of the studied varieties is at a low level and averag-es 8.9% with a variation from 4.8% in the Altai variety to 16.4% in the Kulundinsky 1 variety. The study of the rela-tionship of self-fertility and the number of seeds in an an-thodium showed high dependence between these charactionship of self-fertility and the number of seeds in an an-thodium allows conducting primary evaluation of self-fertility on this basis.