MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERIZATION AND GENETIC DIVERGENCE IN BRINJAL GENOTYPES (Solanum melongena L.)

Abstract

The experiment was conducted at the Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University (SAU), Dhaka in field condition during the period from September, 2019 to March, 2020 to study the morphological and genetic divergence in brinjal genotypes. Genetic diversity of 15 brinjal genotypes were accomplished based on 14 quantitative traits. Genetic divergence was assessed by Cluster Analysis, Principal Component Analysis, Principal Coordinate Analysis and Canonical Variate Analysis which showed similar results. From ANOVA significant variations were noticed among the brinjal genotypes for all the traits under the current study. Multivariate techniques were applied to classify the genotypes. All the genotypes were grouped into five clusters. Cluster I, II and III each had the minimum one genotype and the cluster III had the maximum of 10 genotypes respectively. The highest inter-cluster distance was observed between II and IV (2585.92), and the lowest intercluster

distance was observed between the cluster III and IV (705.58) suggesting that existing of wide distance among these clusters. The highest and lowest intra-cluster distance was observed between the cluster IV (941.81) and cluster III (788.83) respectively. Under the correlation coefficient study, it was observed that days to 50% flowering, days to first fruit harvest, weight of single fruit, fruit breadth and fruit number per plant was positively correlated with fruit yield per plant but negatively correlated with percent insect infestation of fruit and plant. The characters such as number of fruits per plant, fruit length, fruit breadth and single fruit weight contributed maximum towards divergence among the genotypes. Considering diversity pattern and other agronomic performance, the genotype G1 from cluster I, Genotype G8 from cluster II, genotype G11 and G14 from cluster III could be considered as better parents for future hybridization program.