Onion breeding program in Turkey

Abstract

The bulb onion (Allium cepa L.) has been cultivated for thousands of years and is broadly dispersed over Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and western Pakistan. Onion is one of the earliest produced and consumed crops in Turkey and is used daily in cooking by all Turkish families year-round. In addition to consumption as food, onion and its relatives are still used in remote villages of Turkey to cure or enhance some health problems such as asthma, bolting, fertility, infections, high blood pressure, high fever, kidney stone, parasite, and hemorrhoid. The edible Alliums are grown worldwide and have been historically maintained as open pollinated populations and are grown as fresh shoots for green salad onions and as bulbs to consume as fresh, pickled, dehydrated, cooked, or to produce onion seed or sets. Turkey produces approximately 3% of the world onion production. Our breeding achievements of onion in Turkey are better quality, high yield, uniformity, resistance to diseases, bulb size, shape, color, pungency, single center, firmness, tightness of scale and neck, dormancy, amount of soluble solids, earliness for harvest, anthocyanins, and antioxidant activities. We had improvements in reducing split or multiple centered bulbs rates, increasing earliness and uniformity at harvest, firmness, scale and neck tightness, anthocyanins and antioxidant activities. Our onion breeding program from 2002 to 2010 in Turkey will be discussed at the presentation.