Winter bread wheat selective breeding in the Altai Region

Abstract

Throughout the history of winter wheat growing in Siberia, significant areas have been achieved in the last decade. The Altai Region is the most productive region in this regard; the sawn area under the crop is approximately 180 000 ha or 70% among the regions of the Siberian Federal District. Such impressive success was preceded by many years of attempts to introduce winter wheat beyond the Urals. Currently, the Register of Breeding Achievements contains 14 varieties of winter soft wheat developed in Siberia. The new winter wheat variety of the Altai Region’s plant breeders is Oktyabrina (Patent No. 13725/26.06.2024). The promising genotype underwent selection testing under the name Lutescens 83/5 obtained by crossing the Sibirskaya Niva variety with the Lutescens 8847 accession. On three-year average of competitive variety testing, the advantage of the new variety over the standard was 0.55 t ha. The high yield potential was confirmed at the ecological test on the farm of the OOO Oktyabrskoye in the Altai Region, the additional yield reached 1.29 t ha. The variety Oktyabrina has better tillering potential (+0.4 tillers per plant), better ear grain content (+2.0 grains) and thousand-kernel weight (+4.0 g). One of the main achievements was the reduction of the culm height by 22 cm compared to the standard; as a result the new variety achieved the maximum resistance to lodging - 5 score points. In terms of physicochemical indices, on six-year average, the variety Oktyabrina has an advantage over the variety Zhatva Altaya regarding following indices: dough resilience (+16 units), flour strength (+81 units), and dough dilution (-22 units). The other indices are close to the standard. The variety belongs to the class of “valuable” wheat.