MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS FOR WHEAT GENOTYPES CULTIVATED IN BRAZILIAN SAVANNA (CERRADO)

The objective of this research was to evaluate the metabolic, physiological, biometric and productive characteristics of six wheat cultivars, commonly cultivated in the Cerrado of Minas Gerais, through multivariate analysis (Principal Components Analysis: PCA), in order to characterize the performance of these cultivars in the Cerrado conditions, in two years (2016 and 2017). Keywords: Triticum aestivum L., physiology, sugars, dryland cultivation INTRODUCTION The Cerrrado, a Brazilian neotropical Savanna, covers 204.7 million hectares in the centre of the country (Sano et al, 2010), and it can be considered a region with great potential for the production of tropical wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) (Pasinato et al., 2018). After collection, the flag leaves were put into 50 mL Falcon® tubes, which were then placed in Styrofoam boxes containing ice and taken to the laboratory, where approximately 150 mg of leaves were grounded in liquid nitrogen to obtain a fine powder and extracted with 1.5 ml of an ethanol/water mixture (80/20; v/v) during 1 h, then the samples were centrifuged at 3000·g, at 4 °C, during 10 min. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION In our research we observed that water scarcity inhibited the genetic potential of crop growth and production, this behaviour is expected in plants under drought stress, according (Fotouhi et al., 2017) this is one of the several environmental factors that greatly limiting crop production and plant establishment, and we adopted the multivariate analysis for understand different mechanisms in wheat plant, under different water conditions by two consecutive years.