Morphogenetic analysis of pineapple cultivars of Tripura

Pineapple is grown in India in diverse agro-ecological zones and Queen, Kew and Mauritius are grown in commercial plantation and farming systems. Selections of superior genotypes of existing varieties are important in identifying potential regions for area expansion in new region as well. Morphological and molecular diversity of four pineapple cultivars of Tripura were undertaken. High phenotypic variances were observed for number of suckers, number of slips, crown weight, fruit weight, percentage of heart rot and percentage of cannery recovery. On the other hand heritability of most of the characters was found very high, except fruit length and number of eyes per fruit. In morphological analysis, clone, belonging to Mauritius showed dissimilarity with Kew but similarity with Queen. Ten ISSR and 20 RAPD primers were tested for their ability to give reaction to pineapple DNA. Among them, 8 primers showed polymorphism. However, RA₁ and IS-12 gave only monomorphic bands. Level of polymorphism was found very low. Among the RAPD primers, RA₂ showed the highest PIC value (0.30) followed by RA₄ (0.18) and among the ISSR primers IS-9 and IS-6 with 0.28 were found informative. Molecular analysis showed close similarity with Queen and Kew. Clone PQM-1, though was more similar to Queen in morphological parameters was distant from Queen in molecular diversity analysis. Mauritius was almost similar to Queen, which was shown from the very low Euclidian distance coefficient (52.0). The highest dissimilarity coefficient was estimated for Kew (452.8).