Agro-morphological Variability of Bottle Gourd Accessions Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl in Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

Bottle gourd Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl is one of the oleaginous cucurbits grown in Cote d'Ivoire with socio-economic and food importance that could play an important role in food security. The increase in the production of this species for improvement of plant yield remains a major challenge that begins with the agro-morphological characterization of local varieties present in different production areas. The objective of this study is to estimate agro-morphological variability within the Lagenaria siceraria seed collection of Nangui Abrogoua University. The study focused on 26 accessions collected in the different production areas of the species. The experimental design is a randomized complementary block. Descriptive analyzes under the observation of fourteen descriptors showed the existence of a great variability between accessions for the yield characters. Multiple variance analysis showed that there is a highly significant difference between accessions and provenances for the majority of traits studied. The structuring of accessions according to areas collection revealed by principal component analysis is confirmed by discriminant factor analysis. The classification of accessions and identification of the groups were carried out by hierarchical ascending classification which made it possible to elaborate a dendrogram which presents two groups of phenotypic diversity. It appears that the most relevant variables that describe the best variability between groups are fruit size (FH), fruit weight (FW), number of seed (NS), and seed weight (SW). These analyzed characters can thus constitute basic criteria to differentiate accessions and to be used in studies of morphological diversity of L. siceraria.