Vol. 10, Issue 10 (2021)

Author(s):
P Kavya, V Satyanarayana Rao, JV Ramana, B Sreekanth, Y Radhakrishna and SK Naffez Umar

Abstract:
A field experiment was conducted during Kharif, 2017 at Agricultural College farm, Bapatla to assess genetic variability, heritability and diversity of 110 sweet sorghum genotypes. The observations were recorded for 13 quantitative traits. Estimates of PCV were narrowly higher than the corresponding GCV values for the characters days to 50% flowering, days to maturity and Stem girth. The number of nodes per plant, grain yield, fresh stalk yield, brix, T.S.S, juice yield and ethanol yield have moderate differences between PCV and GCV values while rest of the characters viz., plant height, 1000 grain weight, panicle weight have shown a higher magnitude of difference between GCV and PCV. All characters studied have shown high heritability coupled with high genetic advance. Diversity analysis using Mahalanobis D² grouped 110 genotypes into eight clusters of which Cluster- I was possessing the highest number of genotypes (i.e., 78) followed by Cluster-III with 15 genotypes, Cluster - II with 12 genotypes, Cluster-IV, V, VI, VII, VIII are solitary. The highest inter-cluster distance was observed between cluster II and VIII, followed by Cluster V recorded the highest value for brix% and total sugars estimation, Juice yield recorded the highest means in cluster – VII. Variability results indicates phenotypic selection is effective and based on the diversity, the genotypes from diverse clusters can be used in the hybridization program to generate wide range of transgressive segregants for genetic enhancement of sweet sorghum for ethanol related traits.