Genetic biodiversity contribution to increase the oil quality and protein content in sunflower

Maria Joiţa-Păcureanu^1,2, Gabriel Popescu², Gabriel Florin Anton¹, Victor Petcu^1,2, 
Simona Petruța Simion², Ioana Claudia Todirică²

¹ NARDI Fundulea
² CSRAB Bucharest

Keywords: biodiversity; sunflower; genetic variability; oil quality; genetic progress.

Abstract: Biodiversity is the diversity of life on earth, including plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms. 
At the genetic level, biodiversity includes the diversity found between varieties and landraces of the same crop, but also extends to diversity present in crop wild relatives. 
There are efforts of scientists exploring agrobiodiversity, to develop genetic tools critical for improving crop performance to support both resilience to climate stresses, and local adaptation to low-input agriculture.
Oilseed sunflower accounts for up to 12% of the worldwide production of vegetable oils, ranking fourth after palm, soybean and canola oil .
Compared to the other main temperate crops, cultivated sunflower is a recent crop. It experienced a domestication bottleneck that narrowed its genetic base but the large number of sunflower CWR makes it possible to mine a vast genetic pool for crop improvement.
The use of CWR in the sunflower breeding is a long tradition in the breeding programs.
A significant number of inbred lines have been created by interspecific crosses.
These lines, together with the wild populations, represent a valuable resource of useful alleles that are abundantly used in the breeding program for increasing genetic variability.
By using a very various and valuable germplasm, in different breeding programs there have been obtained valuable inbred lines, having very good quality, by increasing the high oleic acid content, content in tocoferols, also protein content.
It has been obtained an important genetic progress, regarding the productivity, also different types of oil  (high linoleic or high oleic) and adaptation to the biotic and abiotic factors.
There have been studied some new sunflower hybrids – contribution of genetic diversity for increasing of productivity and quality.