Centre for Plant Breeding and Genetics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641 003, India.
1Part of Ph.D thesis of the first author.
Sixty nine cowpea genotypes, which included 60 genotypes from Vigna unguiculata ssp. unguiculata and eight genotypes from Vigna unguiculata ssp. sesquipedalis were evaluated for nine quantitative characters and replication-wise means were subjected to Mahalonobis D2 analysis. All the accessions were grouped into twelve clusters, in which cluster I was the largest having 47 genotypes from sub species unguiculata. Unguiculata were grouped in seven distinct clusters, whereas the genotypes of Sesquipedalis were grouped in five other distinct clusters. Days to maturity contributed maximum to the genetic divergence followed by hundred seed weight and characters namely number of branches per plant, number of seeds per pod and total exhibited least contribution among the accessions.
