Genetic diversity of forage grasses as source material for breeding

The aim was to include new accessions of perennial leguminous and cereal grasses to the collection, to evaluate them in terms of a set of valuable morphological and economic features and to identify sources of these features for breeding. Results and Discussion. The collections of gene pool accessions created due to introduction of cultivars and wild forms as well as breeding accessions identified during practical breeding serve as initial material for the breeding of red clover, alsike clover and cock's-foot in the Institute of Agriculture of the Carpathian Region. For the period of 2000-2017, 944 accessions of forage grasses registered in the Central Database were included in the collection: 405 legumes (red clover – 161, alsike clover – 11) and 539 cereals (cock's-foot – 145); 591 accessions were stored in the National Depository. In-depth studies of morphological and economic traits of the accessions allowed us to create and to register a basic collection of the forage grasses gene pool, a trait collection of red clover for yield and resistance to powdery mildew (it includes 52 accessions from 5 countries), a trait collection of cock's-foot for yield and resistance to unfavorable factors (49 accessions from 8 countries) and to register valuable red clover accession No. 193 and cock's-foot accession Drogobychanka Piznia with the NCPGRU. Based on the collection accessions, cultivars were created and included in the State Register of Plant Varieties Suitable for Dissemination in Ukraine: red clover Truskavchanka since 2016, alsike clover Prydnistrovska since 2002, cock's-foot Marichka since 2014. Since 2015, red clover cultivar Ukrainochka and cock's-foot cultivar Boikivchanka have been tested in the state scientific expert evaluation. Conclusions. The creation of the genetic resource collection allowed us to study and analyze the genetic potential of the species, to identify initial material with valuable economical traits, which will significantly increase the efficiency of fodder grasses breeding.