محسن جان محمدی

Garden cress (Lepidium sativum L.) is an annual herb which belongs to the Cruciferae family which grows in the Middle East, Europe and USA (Karazhiyan et al. 2009). It has gained more interest from different food consumers and vegetable producers worldwide, and can be a good choice for health promoting substances such as glucotropaeolin (Zhan et al. 2009) Garden cress is native to South west Asia and probably Iran and is cultivated in North America, parts of Europe and as culinary vegetable all over Asia (Doke and Guha 2014). Garden cress has been used in local traditional medicine and so it also highlights the good potential of garden cress seeds and its extracts for medicinal uses (Rehman et al. 2012). Its seeds have been used in traditional medicine to treat asthma, hypertension, hepatotoxicity, hyperglycemia, enuresis and fractures (Razmkhah et al., 2016). Computation of correlation coefficients is a method to evaluate breeding materials for seed yield and to examine direct and indirect contributions to traits and yield via path analysis (Sabaghnia et al. 2010). Bedassa et al. (2013), reported that direct effects of number of seeds per plant, days to flowering initiation, biomass yield per plant, harvest index and 1000-seed weight on seed yield of garden cress were considerable and could help to identify genotypes with large seed yield production. The 1000-seed weight and biological yield showed to be the most correlated traits with seed yield by means of simple correlations with garden cress seed yield, and traits days to maturity and number of primary and secondary branches exhibited the maximum positive indirect influence passing through biological yield on seed yield Sabaghnia et al. (2015). Therefore, this investigation has been initiated in view of filling such information gap in relation to estimate Pearson correlation coefficients between seed yield and yield components for garden cress genotype and to investigate direct and indirect effects of yield com