Stability and Diversity of Elite Lines of Vegetable Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata ssp. unguiculata L.)

The present study was conducted to study the stability and diversity of twenty elite breeding lines of vegetable cowpea developed at ICAR-Indian Institute of Vegetable Research, Varanasi through AMMI analysis and cluster analysis respectively.

All the 20 elite lines were laid out in randomized block design with three replications during three years of sowing viz., Kharif-2018, Kharif-2019 and Kharif-2021. Each year was considered as one location and the dependant variable pod yield per plant was subjected to AMMI analysis for GE interaction study. The mean of all the yield and yield attributes was subjected to cluster analysis for genetic divergence study.

AMMI ANOVA showed significant variation for environments (E), genotypes (G) and GxE interactions. The graphical representation of principal component 1 (PC1) vs yield (Y) showed that the genotypes 12,15,11,13,18 were most stable and the PC1 vs PC2 graph showed that the genotypes 12,11,13,18 were most stable as they were positioned towards the origin. The cluster analysis grouped all the twenty genotypes into four clusters with two genotypes (7,20) in first cluster, five genotypes (17,14,16,8,19) in second cluster, eight genotypes (9,6,1,13,11,12,2,15) in third cluster and five genotypes (5,3,18,4,10) in fourth cluster.