abstract
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Tibetan Plateau is one of the highest areas in the world. In the area higher than 3000m, more than million people are living. Originally in this area Tibetan tribe has lived with their own culture. They traditionally eat six-row naked barley as a major food. Thus, unique barley genetic resources are found in the area. As well as barley, although the amount is not so much, wheat landraces has been also grown in the area, which probably contain unique genetic feature, for example, high elevation and cold temperature tolerance. In summer 2015, we explored genetic resources in the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province, China. There we realized that the landraces in the area face serious genetic erosion probably because of surprisingly rapid modernization. Even barley, that is staple crop in the area till now, were hardly found, and even if found, they were morphologically unified modern cultivar. Wheat was furthermore difficult to find. However, we totally collected 19 samples of wheat in the area obtained from field or purchased in local markets. Among them, real landraces kindly provided from small wheat field of a local Tibetan family were included. In the family's field, several morphologically different types were mixed grown. We separated them to seven accessions based on spike morphology. We characterized these 19 Tibetan wheat accessions based on agricultural 12 basic traits such as plant height, heading date, number of spikes, etc., grain hardness and grain protein content. Grain hardness were surveyed by SKCS and puroindoline genotype. The values of basic traits are quite various among the 19 accessions, some of which showed easy preharvest sprouting. As for grain hardness and protein content, many accessions showed the tendency of hard wheat that is not traditional type in this area. On the other hand, all the seven accessions collected from Tibetan family’s field was soft wheat that was probably typical in the area. These results indicate that the traditional wheat cultivation in this area along with their own food culture is rapidly collapsed in this area.