Abstract
Lima bean, a highly important legume, serves as a source of protein, reducing nutritional dependency on meat and other beans, especially for needy populations. This crop, with production concentrated in the Northeast of Brazil, has been the subject of very few studies, considering the evaluation of varieties predominantly with indeterminate growth habit. The characterization of material presenting determinate growth, an agronomically important characteristic, may subsidize breeding programs. We characterize subsamples of determinate growth lima bean in morpho-agronomic terms and estimate genetic divergence. We identified pairs of divergent and complementary genotypes for crosses. The genotypes were grouped in six and five groups in regard to the Tocher and UPGMA methods, respectively, for the quantitative traits. For the qualitative traits, three groups were formed. Analyses of canonical variables identified traits related to production of importance for variability. The study shows the importance of characterization of new genotypes for conservation and future utilization.
Highlights
The species Phaseolus lunatus L., known as lima bean or butter bean, is the second most grown and consumed of the Phaseolus genus (Delgado-Salinas et al 1999, Oliveira et al 2004)
The following quantitative and qualitative traits were evaluated per individual plant, according to crop standards published by Bioversity Internacional (IPGRI 2001): number of days for flowering (NDF); number of days to pod maturity (NDM); length of main branch (LMB); number of nodes on the main branch (NNMB); insertion height of the first pod (IHP); pod length (PL); pod width (PW); number of locules per pod (NLP); number of beans per pod (NBP); 100 seed weight (100SW); bean length (BL); bean width (BW); bean thickness (BT); pod color (PC); bean background color (BC); bean pattern color (BPC); second pattern color of the bean (SPC); bean seed coat pattern (SCP); bean shape (BS); seed testa texture (STT) and seed testa separation (STS)
Estimates of measurements of dissimilarity among the subsamples, according to Mahalanobis generalized distance (D2) (Table 2), indicated the subsamples UFPI 640 and UFPI 728 as the most distant between themselves, which is explained by the fact of these differing in regard to most of the traits, being similar only for traits that varied little, such as the number of nodes on the main branch and height of insertion of the first pod
Summary
The species Phaseolus lunatus L., known as lima bean or butter bean, is the second most grown and consumed of the Phaseolus genus (Delgado-Salinas et al 1999, Oliveira et al 2004). Growing of lima beans is traditionally carried out by native populations in Mexico, Peru and adjacent regions (Martinez-Castillo et al 2004, Camarena 2005); the United States is the greatest producer, using even cultivars from breeding programs (Vieira 1992, Kee et al 1997), and, in Brazil, the species assumes economic and social importance, notably in the Northeast states (Vieira 1992). In spite of the relative increase in production through the years, growing of lima bean is performed by family farmers and adding to this the existence of a greater tradition of common bean consumption, the particular flavor of the lima bean, which sometimes serves as an attractive and sometimes repulsive factor for consumers, and its longer cooking time, there has been reduced consumption and scarce interest in research (Santos et al 2002, Azevedo et al 2003)
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