Faculty of Agriculture, Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Mohanpur, Nadia, West Bengal
Online published on 31 December, 2014.
Genetic diversity is crucial for genetic improvement of crops. If the information on genetic diversity is not enough to utilize, the genetic diversity study should be very useful and essential. Accordingly, the genetic parameters, character association, and clustering pattern were studied on a large number of lentil germplasm accessions (thirty six) during 2013 and 2014 at BCKV, Mohanpur, Nadia of West Bengal. Significant variation was noticed for all the traits. High heritability estimates were observed for plant height followed by seeds yield. High estimates of heritability coupled with high genetic advance and high GCV were observed for seed yield indicating that the character are mainly governed by additive genes and selection of such traits might be effective for the improvement of seed yield. The inclusion of diverse parents in the hybridization program serves the purpose of combining desirable genes in new recombination. Cluster analysis using D2 statistics distributed the genotypes into three broad clusters. Clustering pattern revealed distribution of genotypes from the same origin in more than one cluster indicating non-parallelism between geographic and genetic diversity. Members of the cluster I and III were highly diverse from each other as these clusters showed maximum intercluster distance. Hence, genotypes belonging to the cluster I and III can be used as parents for the hybridization program for the development of high yielding lentil genotypes. The entries of cluster III showed the highest mean values for plant height and seed yield per plant. Diversified germplasm possessing different desirable traits may prove useful for incorporation of these traits in the lentil improvement programme.
