Genetics, Plant Breeding and Seed Production 284 48 th Croatian & 8 th International Symposium on Agriculture | Dubrovnik | Croatia ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC PAPER Study regarding the variability of the pods productivity of a Phaseolus vulgaris var. nanus landraces Madoş Emilian 1 , Ciulca Sorin 1 , Velicevici Giancarla 1 , Sasu Lavinia 2 , Avdanei Constantin 1 , Bîtea Nicoleta 1 , Rivis Ioan Dorin 1 1 Faculty of Horticulture and Forestry, Banat Univeerity of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Calea Aradului 119, Timisoara, Romania (madosae@yahoo.com) 2 Faculty of Natural Sciences, Engineering and Informatics, „Vasile Goldis“ Wesern University of Arad, Liviu Rebreanu Street 91-93, Arad, Romania Abstract Utilization of local genetic resources can lead to improvement of genetic progress in plant breading programs. There are many untested bean landraces with high potential for plant breading. Our study was performed on 56 bush bean landraces (Phaseolus vulgaris var. nanus) collected from Western and South-Western Romania, which were compared with some cultivars cultivated in that region. Two main characters were studied: the number and weight of seeds per pod. It was concluded that inside the collection there is a high variability for the two characters, which are dependent to the interaction with the environment. The specific condition from the experimental periods influenced significantly the average values for the two characters. There were local landraces with seeds larger than those of commercial varieties. Regarding the number of seeds in a pod, we could not discover useful cultivars. Exploitation of variability in populations can lead to detection of specimens, superior for their characters. Key words: landraces, bean, pods, productivity. Introduction Bean germplasm presents a high variability due to the great number of species and cultivars. Variability is present in many characters, such as: habitus of plant, shape, size and color of seeds and pods. There is also variability for characters of resistance (Gepts, 2006). Very important in plant breeding are local landraces. The selection applied during years led to homogenization of these population and trot out some important characteristics. These forms could be used for improving some morphological features responsible for yield and resistance to diseases (Zimmermann, 1996; Payro de la Cruz et al., 2005). In Romania these forms can be found especially in hilly and mountain areas. Most of the bean forms are cultivated for pods, meanwhile beans for seed are cultivated in corn fields. Bean yield is induced by a complexity of factors which influence the number of pods per plant and the number of seeds in a pod. To obtain a high yield is also important to keep a balance between these characters (Kelly, 2000). It is difficult to obtain a certain high yield potential. The morphological characters which are components of yield potential are quite unstable due to the mechanisms of interaction between genotype and environment, which are very diverse (Walace and Masaya, 1988; Confalonieri et al., 1992). There are multiple possibilities for bean plant breeding and the selection applied for local landraces is still a valid method (Assefa et al., 2005). Good results can be obtained by also inducing mutation using irradiation (Ernest et al., 2005). Local landraces are very practical in breeding methods using morphological or molecular markers (Geerts et al., 2008). The exploitation of these genetic resources could solve some issues regarding the identification of some characters important for plant breeding (Gepts, 2005, McClean et al., 2004).