Vol. 12, Issue 3 (2023)

Author(s):
Sujit, MK Singh, Neha Belsariya and Vipin Kumar Pandey

Abstract:
Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan (L). Millsp.) is one of major food legume crop after chickpea in India. Assessment of genetic diversity for yield and yield characters and its application for pigeonpea breeding results in enhanced and sustainable nutritional security. In this study 100 germplasm and 4 checks (CGA2, CGA1, RJLN, ASHA) are characterized which was conducted in Augmented Randomized Complete Block Design (RBD) with 4 blocks during kharif 2020-21 and kharif 2021-22 at College of Agriculture, Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya, Raipur, Chhattisgarh for 13 characters Viz., days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height, primary branching per plant, secondary branching per plant, pods per plant, pod length, pod width, number of seed per pod, 1000 seed weight, seed yield per plant, biological yield and harvest index. In this study out of 18, four principal components (PCs) exhibited more than 1.00 eigenvalue and showed about 5% variability among the traits studied. So, these 4 PCs were given importance for further explanation. The PC1 showed 32.74% whereas, PC2, PC3 and PC4 revealed 19.51%, 12.58% and 8.19% variability correspondingly between the genotypes for the characters under study. Cluster analysis result showed existence of considerable diversity in pigeonpea germplasm accession. The inter cluster distance was extreme between cluster III and VIII (75.207) and inter cluster distance was least detected between cluster I and cluster IV (18.454).