Principle component analysis and diversity studies in sunflower lines (Helianthus annuus)

Sunflower crop being a highly cross pollinated with high yield potential, can be grown in all seasons with its suitability in variety of inter and series cropping systems due to its photo insensitive nature and can be adapted to a variety of environmental conditions also. So keeping in mind of its potential and future use, research was conducted with available lines to study PCA and its diversity that might be used in hybridization programmes.

The 45 lines of sunflower were grown in a randomised block design with three replications at the Research Farm, Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, College of Agriculture, Vijayapur during summer 2018-19 for study on principal component analysis and diversity analysis.

At the genotypic stage, the analysis of variance showed highly significant variations among the genotypes for all of the characters. Whereas Divergence analysis using principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis has been shown to be effective in determining which genetically distant parents should be used for hybridization. Divergence in genotypes were divided into nine major groups or clusters and out of nine components, four components had more than one eigen value (Table-2). The first principal component explained 33.40 per cent of total variation, while the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth principal components explained 23.30, 14.10, 11.19, 6.30, 4.90, 3.60, 1.90 and 0.60 per cent, respectively.