Genetic Diversity Analysis for Yield Associated and Quality Traits in Promising Rice Varieties of Tamil Nadu

Abstract

An experiment was conducted with 55 rice varieties to assess the genetic diversity by using Mahalanobis D² Statistical and characterization of genotypes using principal component analysis. All genotypes exhibited a wide and significant variation for 19 traits, by cluster analysis grouped into ten clusters. The maximum genotypes were included in Cluster 6 (16) followed by cluster 4 (10), cluster 3 (8), cluster 2 (7), cluster 5 (5), cluster 8 (4), cluster 1 (2), with 29.09, 18.18, 14.54, 12.72, 9.09, 7.27 and 3.63 proportion respectively, the rest of three clusters had one genotype each. Maximum cluster distance obtained between cluster×constituted by single entry (Pusa Basmati) showed highest inter cluster distance from cluster V (20727.37), VII (18414.79), I (17228.89) and cluster III (17010.24) are having very high inter cluster distance and also by cluster IX from cluster VIII (8852.36), VI (7559.67), I (7444.68) and cluster VII (6666.83) followed by cluster VI from cluster V (6225.95). The lowest inter cluster distance was observed between cluster II and cluster IV III and VI followed by between cluster I and cluster VIII, XI, II, VI and cluster IV. The intra cluster D² values ranged from Zero (Cluster VII, IX, X) to 2233.91 (Cluster VIII). Contribution of amylose content was highest towards genetic divergence (23.43%) by taking 348 times ranked first followed by days to 50% flowering (23.37%) by 347 times, single plant yield (23.3%) by 346 times. The PCA analysis showed that first eight principal components accounted for about 85.4%.