Abstract
Barley is one of the widely grown cereal crop in the highlands of Ethiopia. Twenty five malt barley genotypes were evaluated using a 5 × 5 simple lattice design at Holetta, Bekoji, Debreberhan and Kofele locations to group tested malt barley genotypes, to characterize traits that contribute to total variability and to determine genetic variability among malt barley genotypes. The tested genotypes showed significant variation for all eleven agronomic and malt quality traits considered in this experiment. The candidate genotype (IBON-HI 118/2016) showed relatively better malt quality and agronomic performance. The first three principal components (PCs) contributes 85% total variability. Days to heading, maturity and malt quality traits (protein, extract and friability), plant height and grain yield contribute chiefly for 50% percent variability explained by PC 1. Based on cluster analysis the tested genotypes grouped into three clusters (C) consisted of 15 (C-I), 8 (C-II) and 2 (C-III) genotypes. C-I contain genotypes which had relatively better grain yield. Whereas, C-II consists of barley genotypes with better malt qualities. Thus, crossing among genotypes from these two clusters could give better genetic recombination for important malt quality and agronomic traits. Keywords: Cluster analysis, genetic variability, principal component DOI: 10.7176/ALST/85-03 Publication date: January 31 st 2021
Highlights
Barley is the fifth most important cereals of Ethiopia. It accounts for about 6.42 % of the total area and 5.63 % of the gross grain production of cereal crops, more than 3.7 million small holder farmers engaged in barley production (CSA, 2019)
Principal component analysis used to reduce the dimensionality of large data sets into a smaller one that still contains most of the information in the large set (Jaadi, 2019)
The principal components analysis showed that malt quality traits, phenological traits, plant height and grain yield contribute for variation recorded by PC 1
Summary
Barley is the fifth most important cereals of Ethiopia. It accounts for about 6.42 % of the total area and 5.63 % of the gross grain production of cereal crops, more than 3.7 million small holder farmers engaged in barley production (CSA, 2019). In Ethiopia, there is a high demand of malt barley with the introduction of new breweries and malt factories (Bekele et al, 2005; Kifle, 2016) This make barley an important cash crop for farmers found in high lands of the country. The Holetta Agriculture research center is one of the major breeding center for malt barley improvement It conducts selection activities from lines derived from its own crossing activities and introduced materials from international sources. Cluster and principal component analysis are popular multivariate analysis techniques used to group and characterize genotypes The former used to partition a set of data into clusters, where objects within the cluster are similar to one another, while dissimilar to objects in other clusters (Han et al, 2012). This study was, aimed to group malt barley genotypes into similar groups, to characterize traits that contribute to total variation and to determine genetic variability among malt barley genotypes
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