Abstract
Sugarcane has been cultivated by smallholder farmers since16thcentury in Ethiopia and preceded the commercial production. However, as far as this study is concerned, no exploration and collection have been conducted to know the landraces and study the regional diversity of the crop. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to collect native sugarcane landraces in Ethiopia and to assess phenotypic diversity and analyze regional distribution among landraces collected from different geographical regions. More than 300 sugarcane genotypes were collected. The landraces were analyzed for 21 quantitative stalk and juice quality characters and 16 qualitative characters. Phenotypic diversity among landraces was high, as expressed by the large range of variation for mean quantitative traits and the high (0.80) Shannon–Weaver diversity index. Our results provided experimental evidence on occurrence of geographical variation and significant within-region variation where it was high in the regions of Amhara, Benshangul-Gumz, and SNNPR. Wide variability of agronomically important characters in sugarcane such as millable stalk count at harvest, single cane weight, and plant height was observed among regions. These characters also demonstrated high correlation with cane and sugar yield and the altitude of the collection sites. Therefore breeders can utilize accessions of regions showing variability for these characters in selection programs and to design breeding strategies to produce varieties with best commercial merits. The present study contributes to updating sugarcane descriptors adopted from USDA-ARS as well as Bioversity passport data for the future collection and evaluation. The paper discussed insinuation of the results with regard to plant breeding, germplasm collection, and conservation as well as the plausible sources for the wide range of variation observed. This is the first study to report landrace sugarcane genetic resources in Ethiopia and information on geographical pattern of variation in Ethiopian local sugarcane germplasm.
Highlights
Sugarcane plays a significant role in the Ethiopian socioeconomy
The large number of landraces observed during the current study demonstrates the existence of diverse genetic resources of sugarcane in Ethiopia
[37, 41], results of the current study showed that all the quality parameters like sucrose percent, pol percent, brix percent, and purity percent were significantly correlated in positive direction
Summary
Sugarcane plays a significant role in the Ethiopian socioeconomy. Sugar and its byproduct are used for local consumption and export. Sugarcane plantations are expanding with current area coverage of 98,986 hectares and production of 400,000 tons of sugar and 25,388 m3 of ethanol per annum. When all projects are completed the annual sugar production will be boosted to 3.9-4.17 million tons, ethanol production will be 181 million litres and the factories contribute 709 Mega Watt electric power to the national grid. This is 11.8% of sugar production by the leading sugar producer Brazil with a total amount of 35.3 million tons produced in 2016/17 [1]. Brazilian ethanol production reached 30.23 billion litres in 2015/16
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