Starting from the 1990s, a fundamentally new trend began to emerge in the breeding of wheat and other grain crops — the creation of varieties with colored (purple, blue, black) grain, which is now gaining momentum in many countries of the world, including Ukraine. This is a new area of research aimed at significantly improving the nutritional characteristics of grain by biofortification with bioactive pigments anthocyanins with a high level of antioxidant activity. The Institute of Plant Physiology and Genetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine has launched large-scale programs to create breeding material to obtain new varieties of bread wheat and spelt wheat with colored grain and significantly improved nutritional functional status of grain due to high antioxidant activity. In this regard, the aim of our work was to analyze the obtained by us breeding lines of spelt wheat with purple grain for productivity and grain quality. The soft wheat variety Chornobrova and the spelt wheat variety Zorya Ukrainy were used as standards. Among the studied lines, genotypes with easy (80 %) threshing of grain were identified. It was shown that most breeding lines are inferior to bread wheat in productivity. It was found that 12 genotypes have a significantly higher protein content than the bread wheat variety Chornobrova, but do not differ significantly from the Zorya Ukrainy spelt variety. Lines UK 3999N/23, UK 3922N/23, UK 3933N/23, UK 3996N/23 showed significantly higher protein yield per hectare than the standard varieties of spelt and soft wheat. In terms of gluten content, most lines do not significantly differ from the spelt variety Zorya Ukrainy. It was found that the average hardness index of spelt lines varies widely from a positive (+29.8) to a negative (—22.0) value. It was shown that the sedimentation index of spelt is lower than that of soft wheat. In terms of all indices of the flour baking quality, the studied spelt lines are inferior to wheat, but have a higher overall baking score than the Zorya Ukrainy spelt variety. It was confirmed that spelt samples with a higher protein content are characterized by a higher water absorption capacity. Based on the results of many years of selection, a new spelt variety with purple grain «Dobra Novina» was submitted to the State Variety Testing.
Keywords: Triticum spelta L., breeding lines, purple grain, productivity, grain quality
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