PRINCIPAL COMPONENT, CLUSTERING PATTERN AND ASSOCIATION ANALYSIS OF SWEET CORN (ZEA SACCHARATA L.) INBRED LINES

PRINCIPAL COMPONENT, CLUSTERING PATTERN AND ASSOCIATION ANALYSIS OF SWEET CORN (ZEA SACCHARATA L.) INBRED LINES
A. YUVARAJA*, K. RAJARAJAN, K. N. GANESAN, R. RAVIKESAVAN AND A. THANGAHEMAVATHY
Centre for Plant Breeding & Genetics
Tamil Nadu Agricultural University,
Coimbatore-641 003 (Tamil Nadu), India
(e-mail : yugenetics@yahoo.com)
(Received : 29 March 2017; Accepted : 20 May 2017)

SUMMARY

In sweet corn, the assessment of morphological and quantitative traits variation contributing towards genetic diversity is of vital importance. This study was conducted using randomized block design with two replications to evaluate 50 sweet corn inbred lines at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore. The data of nine different morphological and quantitative traits were subjected to simple association between traits, principal component analysis and clustering pattern. The genetic diversity assessed based on plant height, cob placement height, tassel length, number of tassel branches, seed number/row, number of rows/ear, cob length, cob girth and green cob yield. The association analysis showed positive and highly significant correlation of green cob yield with seed number/row (0.82), cob length (0.76), number of rows (0.70), cob girth (0.58), plant height (0.37) and tassel length (0.36). Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the first 3 PCs had Eigen value >1 explaining 73.80 per cent of total variability among the sweet corn inbred lines for nine quantitative traits. This experiment demonstrated high diversity for the characters studied. The resulting phenotypic dendrogram revealed three main clusters (I, II and III) at 0.93 similarity coefficients. The sweet corn inbred lines in the cluster III were identified as superior for cob yield and its components thereby; it can be used in crop improvement programmes.

Key words: Sweet corn, genetic diversity, association analysis, principal component analysis

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