MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS FOR SELECTION OF DIVERSE GENOTYPES
IN PEARL MILLET GERMPLASM
RAMESH KUMAR, URMIL VERMA, VIRENDER MALIK AND DEV VART
Bajra Section, Department of Genetics & Plant Breeding
CCS Haryana Agricultural University
Hisar-125 004 (Haryana), India
*(e-mail : vermas21@hotmail.com)
(Received : 4 August 2015; Accepted : 25 September 2015)
SUMMARY
The focus of this work has been to study the genetic divergence among the pearl millet germplasm and grouping them into different clusters based on yield and yield contributing traits for the hybridization programme. The principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that the higher loading displaying variables on first four PCs were : plant height, ear diameter, number of effective tillers/plant and days to 50 per cent flowering. Genetic divergence analysis was performed on the basis of discriminant analysis using Mahalanobi’s D2-statistics. Based on the relative magnitude of D2-values, 97 genotypes of pearl millet were grouped into six clusters and plant height, ear diameter and grain yield were found the best discriminatory characters for better selection of diverse genotypes.
Key words:Genetic diversity, principal component, cluster distance, D2-value, cluster mean