Title: Genetic variation of developmental stability in barley
Abstract: AASTVEIT, A. H. and AASTVEIT, K. 1984. Genetic variation of developmental stability in barley. —Hereditas 101:155–170. Lund, Sweden. ISSN 0018–0661. The present paper is concerned with developmental stability of Scandinavian barley lines and varieties over years and locations within years. In five series of experiments highly significant interactions between genotypes and years and between genotypes and locations were found in all cases for grain yield. The interaction component of variation has been splitted up into individual genotypic variance components and ecovalences, linear regressions and deviations from linearity, and in principal components. The main results are: (1) Because of great deviations from linearity, the linear regression coefficient was in general found to be inadequate as a stability parameter. Variance components and ecovalences are useful for ranking of genotypes, but cannot be related to special environmental factors. Principal components can divide the interactions into orthogonal components, while a related procedure called PLS can relate the components to special environmental factors. (2) The results indicate similar genotypic stability reactions over years as between locations within years. (3) Differences in stability can be induced by mutagenic treatments. (4) Stability in one character is not always associated with stability in other characters. (5) There was no close genotypic relationship between average grain yield over a range of environments and stability.