• Korean Journal of Plant Resources
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.608-615
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• 2015

Garlic (Allium sativum L.) has been used as both food and medicine in many cultures for thousands of years. Garlic cultivars are completely sterile and propagated through vegetative method. Collection of a large number of fertile accessions of these genus is needed to explore genetic variability. In order to investigate genetic variation among Allium species and its possibilities for direct cultivation in Korea, we characterized 12 accessions of A. longicuspis, flowering wild garlic which had collected from Central Asia, the main center of garlic diversity. Most of A. longicuspis accessions showed higher over-wintering and bolting rate, longer scape length and more number of bulbils than Korean landraces cultivar, Danyang and Euiseong, but A. longicuspis accessions exhibited smaller size of bulbs and bulbils. Most accessions of A. longicuspis had more number of cloves per bulb, except K229596 and K248824 than Korean landraces. All the accessions of A. longicuspis from Central Asia had complete bolters having many flowers and topsets in umbel. Further studies of A. longicuspis should focus on securing true seeds through removal of topsets and crosses among accessions to create the genetic variability.