Genetic diversity in pearl millet inbred restorers for agro-morphological and grain quality traits

Abstract

Genetic diversity was assessed in 60 pearl millet inbred restorers for 10 agro-morphological and six seed quality traits. High range of variation was observed and trait contribution to genetic diversity depicted that panicle length contributed the maximum (19.04 %) followed by panicle girth (18.76 %). Based on the clustering pattern, a total of 09 clusters were obtained of which Cluster II was the largest and comprised of 39 inbreds followed by cluster III with 10. Cluster mean depicted that cluster I, III and IX comprised of potential lines having a desirable mean performance for the traits studied. Cluster distance was also high among these aforesaid clusters thus suggesting their use in hybrid development as well as in recombination breeding for generating better inbreds in pearl millet.

Keywords

• pearl millet
• inbred restorers
• agro-morphological
• seed quality
• genetic diversity