DETERMINATION OF SHAPE IN FRUITS OF CHERRY LAUREL (Prunus laurocerasus) ACCESSIONS BY USING ELLIPTIC FOURIER ANALYSIS

Cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is an important wild edible fruits naturally grown in black sea region in Turkey. Shape attributes of twenty-one cherry laurel accessions were determined both descriptively and based on elliptic Fourier analysis first time in the literature. In the semantic evaluation, shape of most of the accessions was near to sphere. But, the results of the descriptive data showed that the accessions had different size, shape and gravimetric attributes. The accessions such as 30023, 30024 and 30027 had the highest means as to the gravimetric and size attributes, while the means of the 20043, 30028 and 30030 accessions were found to be the lowest. The sphericity data of 30019, 30028, 30030 and 30033 accessions had the highest means ranged between 96.2 and 97.8%. The cluster test divided the accessions to five subclasses. The genotypes in the 5th cluster had the highest gravimetric and size attributes than the other accessions. While the accessions in the 1 cluster were the highest sphericity mean, they had the lowest gravimetric and size attributes.