Visual assessment of phenotype by UPOV descriptor and relatedness of maize lines

Abstract

The information on inter-relations of breeding material and genetic distinctness of available germplasm is important for deciding on the usage mode in breeding programmes. For the given research, phenotype description according to principles of UPOV descriptors was taken from 28 maize lines that are parental components of 20 ZP maize hybrids of known pedigree, from one year and two repetitions. Cluster analysis was conducted in order to establish whether the phenotype characterization of genotypes can be used for defining homogenous groups by relatedness, and to what extent the results are in accordance with the known information on the examined material's pedigree. The cluster analysis, Ward method, based on Squared Euclidian Distance, provided the best concordance with the information on the pedigree of the examined maize lines, so those results are presented in this paper and used for correspondence analysis.

Keywords

• cluster
• correspondence analysis
• maize lines
• phenotype