Abstract
A field experiment was conducted at Department of Agricultural Research in Sebele in the 2012 to 2013 season using nine accessions that were sourced from the National Plant Genetic Resource Centre (NPGRC), Gaborone, Botswana. Multivariate statistical procedures such as clusters and principal component analysis were used on 15 selected characters to assess agro-morphological variability among tepary bean landraces collected in Botswana. Few characters were statistically significant which suggest lower genetic diversity among the Botswana tepary beans. The first three PCA accounted for 77.12% of accumulated variation. Traits which revealed significant contribution to variation among accessions were number of leaves, plant spread, pod width, 100 seed weight and seeds per pod. The dendrogram results also showed that these characters contributed significantly to the grouping of accessions into three clusters. Three accessions GK011, MTS (Motsumi) and GK012 were separated from the rest of the accessions. However, GK012 and MTS (Motsumi) with highest number of valuable traits are recommended for plant breeders to use as parents in future breeding programs. Key words: Tepary bean, agro-morphological traits, dendrogram, principal components analysis, multivariate analysis.
Highlights
The cultivated tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius A.Gray) is a short life cycle legume originally from the deserts and semi-arid environment of northwesternMexico and southwestern United States (Nabham and Felger, 1978)
Fifteen agro-morphological characters were used to assess the variability of the accessions: Plant height (PH), number of leaves (NL), leaflet width (LW), leaflet length (LL), plant spread (PS), number of branches (NB), pods per plant (PPP), pod length (PL), pod width (PW), seeds per pod (SPP), pod weight per plant (PWP), seeds per plant (SPP), 100 seed weight (100SW), shoot dry weight (SDW) and yield per m2 (YIELD) (Table 2)
A summary of the results for the mean, range and variances for the 15 characters are presented in large ranges were observed among some traits, such as in yield m2 (48 to 254 g), number of seeds per plant (49 to 189), number of leaves per plant (43 to 121) and pod weight per plant (10 to 36 g)
Summary
The cultivated tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius A.Gray) is a short life cycle legume originally from the deserts and semi-arid environment of northwesternMexico and southwestern United States (Nabham and Felger, 1978). Gray) is a short life cycle legume originally from the deserts and semi-arid environment of northwestern. It is recognized for its resistance to heat, drought and many diseases (Salgado et al, 1994; Miklas and Stavely, 1998; Rao et al, 2013). These characteristics make it an ideal crop in parts of tropical. Important for Botswana with a semi-arid environment. The crop has no established varieties in Botswana farmers are using landraces which are usually low yielding. Since few famers are involved in planting tepary bean, the development of new varieties could potentially encourage the growing of this crop. The crop is grown in Africa and Middle Eastern countries (Tinsley et al, 1985) where the seeds provide high protein good for human nutrition
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
