Assessment of Genetic Diversity using Mahalanobis D2 Statistics in Lentil (Lens culinaris L. Medikus)

Author: Harsh Deep*, S.K. Verma, R.K. Panwar and Amit Kumar Gaur

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Abstract

Lentil is a valuable pulse crop with a high nutritional value and a high market price all over the world. Crop improvement largely depends on extend of genetic diversity in a crop species. In present investigation genetic divergence was assessed among 68 lentil genotypes consisting of released varieties and advanced breeding lines using Mahalanobis’s D2 analysis. Based on D2 values genotypes were grouped into nine clusters. Most of the released varieties were placed in cluster I that possessed 15 genotypes, which implies that they share common parentage and have similar agromorphological features. Inter cluster distance was maximum between cluster VII and IX followed by cluster V and VII. It was found that the single genotype (PL406) present in cluster IX was highly diverse from other genotypes as inter cluster distance between cluster IX and most of the other cluster was relatively high.Thus, hybridization among these genotypes can generate desirable transgressive segregants. The ch

Keywords

Genetic divergence, Lentil, D2 analysis, cluster distance