Preliminary evaluation of agronomy and quality traits of nineteen Melilotus accessions

The agronomy and quality traits of nineteen introduced biennial Melilotus accessions were preliminarily evaluated in Yuzhong, Gansu Province. The results showed that the introduced accessions always performed better and plant height, air dry weight, acid detergent lignin and coumarin content have great variations. The plant height of overseas Melilotus accessions were significantly higher (P0.05) than that of the domestic accessions (LX05 and LX03), and air dry weight of over 75% of accessions were significantly higher (P0.05) than that of the domestic accessions. The coefficient variation (CV) of coumarin content was the greatest among all traits (49.12%). The plant height had significantly positive correlations with air dry weight (P0.05). The ratio of leaf to stem had significantly positive correlations with crude protein (P0.05) whereas it had significantly negative correlations with neutral detergent fiber(P0.05) and acid neutral detergent (P0.01). Through principal component analysis (PCA) with nine character indices, five principal components were fiber factor, biomass factor, plant height factor, quality factor and coumarin factor. Nineteen Melilotus accessions were divided into five groups through the cluster analysis and group Ⅱ was the best. PI552553, Ames25658, PI593233, PI595388 and PI595393 were selected as the better performance accessions with higher biomass, lower coumarin content and higher crude protein.