Evaluation of morphological diversity of field pea [Pisum sativum subsp. arvense (L.)] germplasm under sub-tropical climate of Manipur

An investigation was carried out to evaluate 51 diverse field pea genotypes at Langol Research farm, ICAR, RC, NEH Region, Manipur Centre for nine yield related quantitative traits and four morphological qualitative traits for practical field pea improvement in Manipur. The combined analysis of variance of genotypes for all the nine traits was found to be significant. The amount of variability in one variable as a linear function of another variable was also measured through phenotypic and genotypic correlation among nine quantitative traits. The pod number per plant, seed number per pod and 100 seed weight showed significant positive correlation with seed yield per plant both at phenotypic and genotypic levels. Multivariate analysis using principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that three principal components (PCs) accounted for > 75% of the total variation. The genotypes were grouped into seven clusters using distance based Agglomerative “Average linkage” method. Three genotypes IPF-5-19, EC-8495, HUDP-15 belonging to cluster II and DDR-30, early maturing variety belonging to Cluster VI were found promising in terms of seed yield for the region.