GROUNDNUT GENOTYPES’ DIVERSITY ASSESSMENT FOR YIELD AND OIL QUALITY TRAITS THROUGH MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Genetic variability is essential in plant breeding for crop adaptation in a specific environment, enhancing yield potential, creating resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, improving quality attributes, and most importantly, selecting desirable and better parents for hybridization programs. The study was designed to ascertain the genotypic diversity of 54 accessions of groundnut (Arachis hypogaea). The study evaluated these accessions/genotypes for 13 different traits (morphological, yield, and oil quality) under the rainfed climate of Pakistan. Significant differences were observed for all studied traits. Likewise, significant difference in the percent coefficient of variability (CV%) was also found for these traits. The research included classifying the genotypes further into six different clusters using the Ward method. Principal component analysis was performed that showed variability in components for different traits. The first five principal components (PCs) showed an eigenvalue of more than one that contributed about 71.83% of the total observed variation. Major characters accounted for by PC1 included pod weight per plant, grain weight per plant, and the number of pods per plant. PC2 positively contributed to oleic acid and shelling percentage, PC3 contributed positively to dry pod yield, plant height, and days to flower initiation, and PC4 contributed for days to 50% flowering, the number of pods per plant, and dry pod yield. These data on genotypic diversity for studied traits in the recent investigation will help breed new groundnut lines to strengthen germplasm sources for cultivar development in rainfed areas of Pakistan.