'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 GENETIC VARIATION OF IRANIAN AND FOREIGN ENTRIES OF COWPEA A. BAGHIZADEH Agronomy Dept., Agriculture College, Tehran University, Iran

More than 300 Iranian and foreign entries of cow pea (Vigna unguiculata) from food legume collection of Iran representing 26 geographical regions were evaluated in the field in Karaj, Iran in 1995 – 1996 to determine the geographical diversity and genetic variability existed in the collection. Each morphotype planted in five-meter row, with 150 cm spacing between the rows. Parastoo and Kamran varieties were planted after 19 rows as checks.  The characters studied were: day to first flowering, days from planting to complete maturity, duration of flowering, plant canopy height and width, number of main branches, number of secondary branches, number of pods per five plant, number of seeds per pod, 100-seed weight, percentage field establishment, leaf length, leaf width, pod length, pod width, seed length, seed width, seed thickness, number of node sin main stem, internode length, number of inflorescence, seed yield, biological yield and harvest index . Statistical analysis including: 1) One-Way analysis of variance to test uniformity of soil. The results showed that soil is uniform. 2) The means, ranges, standard divisions value and phenotypic coefficient of variation for the evaluated characters showed that this collection contains a large amount of variation for some characters. 3) In principal component analysis, the nine components were selected which showed about 70% of data constitutions.