The present investigation was aimed at ascertaining the nature and magnitude of genetic diversity among a set of 12 lentil genotypes through Mahalanobis D2 Method. The genotypes under study fall into four clusters. The cluster-I contained the highest number of genotypes (05) followed by cluster-III (03) and Cluster-II and IV each contained the lowest (02). Cluster-II produced the highest mean value for days to maturity and cluster-I exhibited minimum mean value for pod length (0.64). The inter-cluster distances were much higher than the intra-cluster distances. Members of cluster-III and IV were highly diverse from each other as these clusters showed maximum inter-cluster distance. Cluster-IV exhibited the highest intra-cluster distance while the lowest distance was observed in cluster-I. The highest inter-cluster distance was observed between cluster-III and IV while the lowest was between cluster-I and III. The trait pod length (33.33%) contributed maximum for genetic diversity followed by seed yield/plant (27.27%), 100 seed weight (21.21%) and days to maturity (10.61%). Therefore these characters contributed maximum for getting the genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity, Interactions, Lentil
