Morphological Variability and Identification of Minimum Descriptors in Chilli Based on Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried out in thirty three chilli accessions to assess the relative contribution of different morphological characters to the total variability and to establish a list of minimum descriptors. Eight principal components (PCs) accounting for 88.19% of the total variability among the accessions were extracted. The first PC accounted for 33.08% and the second PC accounted for 17.03% of the total variability and were mainly associated with seedling and fruit characters respectively. Vegetative characters were distributed mostly in the first four PCs. Scatter plot of the accessions drawn from the first two principal components revealed the characters which could discriminate among species and helped in grouping them into different clusters. Twenty eight minimum morphological descriptors were identified on the basis of their correlation with other characters and contribution to the total variability as revealed by PCA and were expected to be highly discriminating. These morphological descriptors would help in quick characterization of chilli germplasm.