Characterization of sorghum genotypes for yield and other agronomic traits through genetic variability and diversity analysis

Studies on the genetic variability and diversity analysis were carried out with 39 sorghum genotypes for nine quantitative characters. The Shannon-Weaver diversity index (H’), a measure of dissimilarity was found to be highest for number of leaves per plant, plant height and leaf width and these characters had high heritability coupled with high genetic advance. Of the 36 correlations, 24 were significant at P=0.05 and 21 were significant at 0.01 and 14 were found to be of useful correlations (r>±0.500). Among the useful correlations, yield had significant correlation with days to 50% flowering, leaf length, leaf width and panicle weight. In path analysis, panicle weight had positive direct effect on single plant yield. First three principal components explained more than 70% of variation which reduced nine characters into seven characters and confirmed the correlation analysis. The highest diversity index (0.879) was observed between TNS598 and IS5030. Hierarchical clustering divided the genotypes into six clusters. Promising genotypes were identified for early flowering, plant height, number of leaves, leaf length and yield based on cluster mean values.