Nature and Magnitude of Genetic Divergence among Blackgram [Vigna mungo (L.) Hepper] Genotypes

Abstract

Background: The choice of parents is a very crucial step which decides the success or failure of any plant breeding programme. Using the diversity analysis, parents with high diversity can be chosen to generate high magnitude of useful variability. Therefore, the present investigation was planned to assess the genetic divergence among 100 genotypes of blackgram for identification of diverse genotypes for their utilization in breeding programme.Methods: The material for study consisted of 100 blackgram genotypes collected from different sources and were evaluated at ARS, Bidar during kharif-2018. The experimental trial was laid out in lattice design (10×10) with two replications. Observations on 12 quantitative characters. The genetic divergence was assessed by using Mahalanobis’ generalized distance (D2) and clustering of genotypes by Tocher’s method.Result: The relative contribution of each character to the total diversity was different and contribution of days to maturity was maximum (66.04%) followed by reproductive period (15.86%). The genotypes were grouped into nine clusters by Tocher’s method. The cluster pattern revealed that, cluster II was the largest with 28 genotypes followed by cluster I (26), V (19), III (11), IV (10) and VII (3) and remaining viz., VI, VIII and IX were solitary clusters. The inter-cluster distance ranged from 15.50 to 514.44 indicating high magnitude of diversity. The genotypes belonging to cluster III viz., BDU-20, BDU-3-20, BDU-68, TRCRU-22 possessed desirable traits like earliness and higher seed size and genotypes of cluster IV viz., BDU-9, BDU-10, LBG-752 possessed traits like higher reproductive period, maturity and high seed yield were identified as diverse. These genotypes could be involved in recombination breeding programme for the improvement productivity in blackgram.