Rokib Hasan¹ , A K M Mahmudul Huque² , M Kamal Hossain¹ , Nazmul Alam¹

1. Plant Breeding and Crop Improvement Laboratory, Department of Botany, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka-1342, Bangladesh
2. Plant Molecular Genetics Laboratory, Division of Life Sciences, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Republic of Korea
Author    Correspondence author
Plant Gene and Trait, 2015, Vol. 6, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/pgt.2015.06.0003
Received: 09 Feb., 2015    Accepted: 17 Apr., 2015    Published: 04 May, 2015

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Hasan et al., 2015, Assessment of genetic divergence in Chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) genotypes, Plant Gene and Trait, Vol.6, No.3 1-5 (doi: 10.5376/pgt.2015.06.0003)

Thirteen genotypes of chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) were investigated to understand the extent of genetic diversity through 6 yield attributing characters. Genetic diversity in chilli genotypes based on six characters was estimated using Mahalanobis’s D² statistics. The genotypes were grouped into five different clusters by non-hierarchical clustering. The cluster I had the maximum number (5) of genotypes while cluster IV and V each contained only one genotype. The highest inter-cluster distance was observed between cluster I and IV (24.483) and the lowest inter-cluster distance was observed between the clusters II and V (11.633). The results indicated that fruits/plant (35.8%) contributed maximum to the total divergence followed by fruit length (21.6%) and yield/plant (21.1%). Cluster IV produced highest mean for fruit weight (4.48), fruits/plant (149.90) and yield/plant (676.03). Cluster V produced highest mean for fruit length (10.23), pedicel length (4.94) and fruit diameter (10.36). Cluster I and III produced maximum lowest mean for almost all characters. Therefore, genotypes belonging to the cluster IV and V may be used as potential parents for future hybridization programme to develop superior Chilli variety with desired traits.

Chilli; Genetic divergence; Cluster analysis; D² statistics