Vol. 11, Issue 5 (2022)

Author(s):
Madhu Choudhary, DK Gothwal, KR Kumawat, R Kumawat, O Kumar and M Bajya

Abstract:
The present study was conducted to identify the nature and magnitude of genetic divergence among forty eight genotypes of fenugreek based on phenotypical traits using the multivariate analysis. Based on cluster analysis, the genotypes were best fitted into five clusters. The maximum and minimum genotypes were grouped in cluster I (21) and cluster V (1) respectively. The inter cluster distance was maximum between clusters II and V (D2=8.115) followed by IV and V (D2=7.856) revealing that the genotypes of these clusters were highly diverse from others and can be used as divergent parents for hybridization and selection. Thus, for getting high heterosis for recovering transgressive segregants, genotypes from cluster II and V can be used as distant parents in any breeding programme for successful fenugreek improvement. Whereas, the maximum intra-cluster distance was shown by cluster IV (D2=4.679) indicating maximum difference among the genotypes within. Among the nine characters studied for genetic divergence, seeds per pod contributed the maximum accounting for 22.78% of total divergence, followed by pods per plant (20.39%) and plant height (16.13%). The result of PCA revealed that all the three principal components (PC-I, PC-II and PC-III) contributed 66.62% of the total variability. The results of present study could be exploited in the future genetic improvement programme of fenugreek genotypes.