Abstract
Fifty-eight durum wheat cultivars were selected from the introduced germplasm from the National Institute of Agro-biological Resources (Japan) in 1990. The selected cultivars were grown in Tunisia under rainfed conditions and in-vestigated on wield potential, number of seedslspike and thousand kernel weight for evaluation of their genetic variations and breeding potential during the 1992/93 grow-ing season. All characters showed relatively large standard deviations and coefficients of variations. Thus, this breed-ing material may be successfully used in Tunisian breeding programs targetting specific goals. Some cultivars per-formed similar to the most commonly grown local cultivars which were included in the experiment as checks. Selection was applied in order to select the best genotypes. Compared to the checks and based on yielding ability, 17 promising lines were identified.
