Morphological characterization of vegetable pea (Pisum sativum L. spp. Hortense) genotypes and their application for distinctiveness, uniformity and stability testing

A major challenge facing those involved in the testing of new plant varieties for DUS is the need to compare new varieties against all those ‘of common knowledge’ and corresponding increase in size of reference variety collections (and hence work-load) and this could entail one possible approach to group new (candidate) varieties and references using descriptions stored in databases, prior to more formal testing. Keeping this in view, a total of 35 released varieties of vegetable pea were grouped for various agro-morphological descriptors. Among the genotypes, 11 showed extra early flower opening (< 40 days), seven showed early flower opening (40–50 days), 16 showed mid-flower opening (51–70 days) and the only genotype NDVP-250 showed late flower opening i.e. more than 70 days after sowing. Out of 35 genotypes, eight showed short, 21 medium and six genotypes showed longer plant height. Low 1000-seed weight (< 150g) was found in two genotypes viz. PSM-3 and NDVP-250, medium (150-200g) in 19 genotypes and higher (> 200g) in 14 genotypes. None of the attribute showed intra-varietal variation. On the basis of 19 descriptors, varieties were grouped into different categories for each character and may be used as reference varieties.