Vegetable Science

Thirteen morphological traits of leaves, fruit and seed were employed to discriminate 127 bottle gourd germplasm, as well as to assess their morphological diversity. Results showed that bottlegourd accessionswere highlydiversified in characteristics of leaves, fruit and seed. Ten quantitative traits exhibited high degrees of variability with significant differences between accessions. Correlation analysis revealed that characters such as fruit length (0.888), fruit width (0.690), fruit weight (0.538), total number of fruits per plant (0.891) and vine length (0.329) had strong correlation with yield per plant at 5% level of significance. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that the first two components were responsible for 36.77% of the phenotypic variability. The first principal component (PC) had accounted for 24.11% of the total variability followed by second PC accounted for 12.64% of the total variability. The genotypes variability evaluated by hierarchical cluster analysis conducted on the quantitative traits, grouped the genotypes into three clusters and cluster-I comprise of medium vine length accessions with lower days to take 50% flowering, high fruit width, number offruitsper plant, 100 seed weight, vine length and yield per plant.