Genetic diversity for morphological and biochemical traits in bulb onion

Abstract

The 43 accessions of bulb onion were analyzed for genetic variability studies based on morphological and biochemical traits. The germplasm under investigation grouped into seven divergent clusters irrespective of their geographical origin based on Mahalanobis D2 analysis. It was found that cluster-I was largest of all with 12 genotypes while cluster-IV and VI were the smallest with only two genotypes. Observations on cluster distances revealed that the intra-cluster distance were less than inter-clusters. In principal component analysis, first seven principal components explained 78.290% of the total variation and only, quantitative characters contributed significantly towards PC-1, whereas qualitative characters in PC-2.