SEL’SKOKHOZYAISTVENNAYA BIOLOGIYA [AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY], 2015, V. 50, ¹ 1, pp. 63-74 ISSN 2313-4836 (Online) doi: 10.15389/agrobiology.2015.1.63rus doi: 10.15389/agrobiology.2015.1.63eng CORRELATION OF BREEDING TRAITS THAT DETERMINE PRODUCTIVITY OF CHICKPEA ( L.) ACCESSIONS FROM THE VIR COLLECTION IN THE CONDITIONS OF TAMBOV REGION S.V. BULYNTSEV, L.Yu. <...> Bol’shaya Morskaya, St. Petersburg, 190000 Russia, e-mail s.bulyntsev@vir.nw.ru, l.novikova@vir.nw.ru, ekaterops@yandex.ru A b s t r a c t Increasing global temperature recently leads to climatic changes towards more drought conditions over large areas, so drought resistant plants should be wider cultivated. <...> Chickpea is a drought resistant crop commercially cultivated in 2013 at 800 000 ha in some region of the Russian Federation with periodic droughts, except the Tambov region, though its geographic and climatic conditions could be appropriate for chickpea growing. <...> For the first time in the Tambov region we investigated the formation of breeding traits that determine seed productivity in 629 chickpea accessions of different origin, including 44 countries, from the VIR (All-Russian Research Institute of Plant Industry, St. Petersburg) World Collection which were selected due to prior wide geographic testing in other Russian regions and abroad. <...> Using statistical methods, i.e. factor, dispersion analysis and clustering, we defined breeding and noticeable traits, the influence of sowing norm, and the countries which were the most perspective as originators of chickpea. <...> It is shown that the number of branches of the 2nd order, the number of pods per plant, plant height, the length of growing period mainly contributed into determining productivity of chickpea plants in the environmental conditions of the Tambov region. <...> The weight of 1000 seeds had a positive relationship with the period from flowering to ripening. <...> A significant association between the weight of seeds per plot and the number of plants was observed with the maximum rate found at 70-80 plants per plot. <...> The variability of accessions in plant dray weight was the greatest and reached the value of = 98.3 %. <...> The first one causing 38 % of variability comprised of a block of correlated traits, namely the number of branches of the 1st and 2nd order, the number of pods per plant and plant dry weight, which were associated with the number of seeds <...>