Morphological profiling and assessment of genetic divergence of brinjal (Solanum melongena L.) genotypes

Abstract

A study was conducted on thirty-eight genotypes including local landraces and public as well as private sector genotypes of brinjal collected from different locality of Odisha, India to assess the value and magnitude of genetic divergence among them using Mahalanobis D2 statistics. The result revealed existence of wide genetic diversity among the 38 evaluated genotypes which were grouped into 13 clusters based on 12 important characters in brinjal. The cluster I was the largest containing 09 genotypes followed by cluster III with 07 genotypes. The diversity among the cluster was measured by inter-cluster distance, highest being observed in between cluster VIII and cluster XIII (D2 = 1142.59) followed by cluster IX and cluster XIII (D2 = 941.02) and cluster V and cluster VIII (D2 = 792.97). Therefore, selection of divergent parents of brinjal based on these cluster distance would be useful in selecting genotypes for hybridization and thereby formulating a comprehensive strategy to develop superior hybrids or better segregates in brinjal. In the present study, superior hybrids or variety (s) can obtained by crossing parents of two divergent groups, cluster VIII (Selection-2 and Selection -8) with cluster XIII (Selection 22).