ANNOUNCEMENTS
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) being the most important legume crop that has rich morphological diversity, but has narrow genetic base which can be ruled out by developing superior genotypes of high genetic variability. A study was undertaken to identify superior prebreeding lines along with some released chickpea varieties to base broaden the breeding program.
The experiment raised in RBD with three replications each. Multivariate analysis was used to assess the diversity among the yield contributing traits. The analysis of variance indicated that the genotypes under study had broad range variation. Correlation studies of genotypes and traits showed that plant biomass (0.894), pods per plant (0.668) showed positive correlation with yield per plant. Plant biomass showed the highest positive correlation value with yield per plant. Principle component analysis generated five principle components that explained 34.6%, 15.9%, 12.47%, 9.4%, 8.45% variability. The highest values in PC1 were observed maximum for pods-plant (0.966) followed by unfilled pods-plant (0.963). PC2 had highest values for 100 seed weight (0.869) followed by filled pods. Morphological data of genotypes was clustered using SAHN method based on Euclidean distance into three major cluster. Nineteen of the eighty SSR primers tested reported polymorphism giving a polymorphism expression of 23.75 %. Dendrogram based on UPGMA method and Jaccard’s similarity coefficients grouped genotypes into five clusters based on genetic distances. Primer NC 89 had the highest PIC (0.37) value and heterozygosity values (0.47). According to the multi-variant analysis and molecular diversity studies G1, G10, G11, G8, G14 and G15 were the most elite lines with superior yield traits that can be used for improvement of chickpea breeding programme.
Keywords: chickpea breeding, molecular markers, pre-breeding derivatives, yield traits.
