Genetic diversity analysis for quality attributes of some promising Coffea arabica germplasm collections in southwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the magnitude of genetic diversity among Coffea arabica germplasm accessions. For this, twenty-one native coffee germplasm collections of six geographical areas were used for the study. The coffee genotypes were field, established in 2002 at the Jimma Agricultural Research Center, southwestern using a randomized complete block design of three replications. Ripe red coffee cherries were handpicked and prepared for laboratory determinations on quality and biochemical attributes. Analysis of variance, clusters, principal component and divergence analyses were computed. The results indicated significant (p<0.01) variations for the most coffee quality and biochemical attributes due to coffee genotypes. Cluster analysis grouped the entries into 4 different clusters. The clusters also demonstrated maximum inter- and minimum intra-variances for all the quality attributes. Moreover, the distances among the clusters were highly significant, indicating the possible superiority of heterosis from the highly divergent parents. The analysis of principal component showed four PCI, PC2, PC3 and PC4 with the respective eigenvalue of 5.11, 1.92,1.73 and 1.16, explaining 84.41% of the total variance. This underlines that coffee breeding strategy within and among geographical areas may provide quality improvement with known origin quality profile. It can be concluded that the promising coffee germplasm collections were diverse in terms of most quality traits and biochemical constituents due to genetic factors. Thus, selection of superior coffee cultivars requires careful evaluations and characterizations for quality attributes and other desirable traits under various field management and processing techniques across locations. © 2011 Asian Network for Scientific Information.