Field performance of 30-year-old soybean germplasm conserved in Indian National genebank

Viability and vigour are the most important indices for assessing the seed quality. The present study was carried out to evaluate the performance of long-term conserved (30 years) soybean germplasm in the genebank. Some 100 accessions of soybean varying in seed morphological characteristics and origin were evaluated for 25 agromorphological traits in field using standard descriptors. Field performance of freshly regenerated germplasm of the same accessions was that of originally conserved accessions. Analysis of variance showed significant difference between the regenerated and conserved accessions. Variations in the performance of genotypes with respect to field emergence, plant height, number of branches/plant, number of pods/plant, pod length, pod width, 100-seed weight and yield/plant between conserved and the regenerated accessions were observed. The mantle correlation between the two correlation matrices is very high (r = 0.936) and the mantle correlation between the distance matrices for regenerated and conserved accessions were highly significant (r = 0.957). The cophenetic correlation between the hierarchial clustering for regenerated and conserved accessions in the tanglegram was highly significant (r = 0.88) showing that the genotypic variation, initial viability and storage period has strong influence on the viability of soybean germplasm under the long-term conservation in genebank.