ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC DIVERSITY IN FOXTAIL MILLET USING CLUSTERING AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

Foxtail millet [Setariaitalica (L.) P. Beauv.] is considered as an important minor millet, grown under varied soil conditions such as drought tolerant crop across the world. This crop has an immense potential for food and fodder in rain fed and arid regions of India. It has a short life cycle and with inbreeding nature. Genetic diversity of this crop is of utmost priority for assessing breeding programs, genetic resource conservation with enhanced yield attributes; identification of putative genes for varied traits evaluated phenotypically. Based on these views, our present study aims at characterization of 60 foxtail millet genotypes by deploying multivariate analysis. The PCA revealed 80.11% of total variability in all the 60 genotypes for the targeted 12 quantitative traits corresponding to 5 Eigen estimation values greater than 0.95. The four principal components (PC) contributed a proportion of 32.19%, 16.97%, 13.44%, 9.60% each of the total variance. Clustering through similarity matrix 60 genotypes were grouped into seven clusters. Major one (Cluster-1) with highest number of genotypes viz., 14 genotypes followed by cluster 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 established with 11, 8,8,8,7 and 4 genotypes individually. Moreover, it was also implicated that Days of maturity (67.06), number of productive tillers per plant (9.83), single plant grain yield (7.01), panicle exsertion (6.89) contributed maximum towards total divergence. This study implies the substantial genetic diversity of the core collection of genotypes used in the study based on the morphological and phenotypic variability; hence giving these traits an emphasis in foxtail improvement programs.