Nowadays, the growing interest in flax attracts more attention
to linseed straw and fiber as by-products of its cultivation in North
America. The associations between stalk fiber content and quantitative
(plant height, number of days from emergence to end of
flowering, petal width, seed weight, seed oil content and proportion
of linolenic acid to total fatty acids) or qualitative (stalk branching,
petal color, petal overlapping, petal margin folding and seed color)
plant characteristics were investigated (Diederichsen and Ulrich,
2009). The results showed that the wide variation in fiber content
of flax germplasm will be a highly useful tool for determination of
germplasm relevant for breeding dual purpose flax. For the same
reason, that is to make one flax cultivar of a dual purpose crop,
genomic regions controlling both stalk fiber and seed quality traits
were investigated (Soto-Cerda et al., 2013). The conclusion was that core collection of flax is suitable for advanced studies targeting
multiple agronomic and quality traits to obtain the goal. Candidate
regions were indicated as being affected by divergent selection
in flax, which after further investigation gives the opportunity to
detect loci influencing complex traits.