1Department of Horticulture, Udai Pratap Autonomous College, Varanasi -211 002, Uttar Pradesh, India
2Division of Crop Improvement, Indian Institute of Vegetable Research, Varanasi - 221 005, Uttar Pradesh, India
The present investigation was carried out on 43 diverse genotypes of cowpea to study the genetic variability, heritability, genetic advance, correlations and path coefficient for different traits and to identify diverse genotypes of cowpea belonging todifferent culti-groups through multivariate analysis. A fairly high degree of variability was observed for most of the traits. Higher estimates of heritability coupled with the higher genetic advance for plant height, number of peduncles per plant, number of pods per plant and pod yield per plant indicated that these traits are under the control of additive genes. Correlationanalysis pointed out the importance of number of branches/plant, peduncles/plant, pods/plant, pod length, pod weight and number of seeds/pod towards pod yield. Forty three genotypes were mainly divided into 2 clusters with 38 and 5 genotypes at the first node. The representatives of distant clusters would be more useful for choosing the parents in cowpea breeding programme.
Genetic variability, Correlation coefficient, Path analysis, Multivariate clustering, Cowpea
