Vol. 9, Issue 7 (2020)

Author(s):
MH Reddy and HP Chaturvedi

Abstract:
The nature and magnitude of genetic divergence were assessed in 16 sesame genotypes. Based on the relative magnitude of D² values all the 16 genotypes were grouped in to 5 different clusters. Cluster I had 12 genotypes while remaining clusters II, III, IV and V had one genotype each. The average inter cluster distance was found to be highest between cluster III and IV (79.94) followed by cluster III and V (63.87) and cluster IV and V (62.64) whereas the lowest inter cluster distance was observed between cluster I and II (29.21). The higher inter cluster distance indicated the presence of more diversity among the genotypes included in these clusters. Thus the genotypes of cluster III and IV could be utilized as potential parents and crossing between these genotypes would result in heterotic expression for yield component traits. The relative contribution of different plant characters to the total genetic divergence estimated by D2 analysis indicated that capsule length contributed the maximum (32.5%) towards genetic divergence followed by number of seeds per capsule (30.83%).