Nitsa is a new spring common wheat variety of ural breeding

The purpose of the current study was to characterize the spring common wheat variety ‘Nitsa’ of Ural breeding by its economically useful traits and properties in comparison with the standard variety and varieties of domestic and foreign breeding. The study was conducted at the Ural Federal Agrarian Research Center of the Ural Branch of the RAS in a specialized breeding crop rotation, the fields of which present the main range of soils in the Middle Urals region in 2020–2023. The variety ‘Nitsa’, developed by the method of intraspecific hybridization between the parents ‘Ekaterina’ (mother) and ‘Krasnoufimskaya 100’ (father), has been included in the State List of Breeding Achievements in the Volga-Vyatka and East Siberian regions of the Russian Federation since 2024. The mean productivity of the variety over the years of competitive variety testing was 3.82 t/ha, which is higher than that of the standard variety (‘Ekaterina’) by 0.36 t/ha or 10.4 %. In the environmental testing at the Krasnoufimsk Breeding Center (2021–2023), the mean productivity of ‘Nitsa’ was 3.40 t/ha, or 0.42 t/ha (14.1 %) higher than that of ‘Ekaterina’, there was identified an excess over the early-maturing varieties ‘Ekstra’ and ‘Iren’ (5.0–32.8 %), the middle-early varieties ‘Tyumenskaya rannyaya’, ‘Svecha’ and ‘Novosibirskaya 31’ (13.7–17.6 %). It was determined that the new variety formed the same productivity as the middle- maturing varieties ‘Ekada 70’, ‘Dariya’, ‘Omskaya 36’. It was established that stress resistance of ‘Nitsa’ was equal to ‘Iren’ and ‘Ekaterina’ and surpassed all the studied middle-early and middle-maturing varieties. The trait ‘breeding value of a variety genotype’ has shown that ‘Nitsa’ forms a high productivity combined with stability. There has been proven a variety’s advantage according to all energy efficiency indicators. There was established weak susceptibility of the variety ‘Nitsa’ against infectious background to loose and kernel smut, root rots. There was identified that baking properties of the new variety belonged to valuable wheat, and to the third class according to the standards for harvested grain. The research results have shown that wheat can be used in breeding as a source of high productivity, stability, disease resistance and improvement of the baking properties of grain.