Gapetctm weweletterCOLLECTION AND EVALUATION OF PEPPER GERMPLASM IN TURKEY M. Nevzat ALAN ‘Aegean Regional Agricultural Research Institute (ARART) Menemen, izmir, Turkey Pepper is one of the basic and traditional vegetable crops in Turkey 9f great economic importance. Since 1978, with the reorganisation of National Plant Genetic Resources Project, the exploring and collecting local varieties of pepper have been started, in order to store them as germplasm for future breeding works. Pepper is mainly grown in small gardens run by single families as many other vegetables and generally it is reproduced on the farm itself. The cultivated areas are scattered all over the country which is big in size and has a broad range of environments. Only since few years commercial lot of seeds has begun to be used and some new cultivars have been developed. It is absolutely necessary to collect and preserve the local varieties before the disappearance of such material which most of them are primitive cultivars and have wide range of variation in many characters. In last six years, 176 different populations of pepper have been collected from south-east (Gaziantep, Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Siirt, Bitlis, Hakkari, Van, Mug, Bingél, Elazig, Malatya, Adiyaman, Kahraman— marag), north-west (Canakkale, Edirne, Tekirdaj, Kirklareli, istanbul, Kocaeli, Sakarya, Bursa, Balikesir), and north-east (Erzurum, Agri ,Kars Artvin, Rize, Trabzon, Giresun) part of Turkey. ‘The seed samples were evaluated mainly in relation to the some morphological features (fruit shape, fruit length,fruit position,mature fruit colour) and fruit pungency. The following table shows number of samples for each character. FRUIT SHAPE 99:Conical’ 37 Bell 30 Elongate 6 Oblate 4 Round FRUIT LENGTH 57 Short 67 Medium 52 Long FRUIT POSITION 118 Declining 58 Erect FRUIT COLOUR 174 Red 1 Yellow 1 Orange FRUIT PUNGENCY 121 Sweet 55 Pungent a7)