EVALUATION OF GENETIC DIVERGENCE AMONG RABI SORGHUM (SORGHUM BICOLOR L. MOENCH) GERMPLASM THROUGH MULTIVARIATE TOOLS

Sorghum is an important nutricereal constituting staple diet of the major population in arid and semi-arid region of the country and tolerant to drought and heat.Precise information on the nature and degree of genetic diversity helps the plant breeder to select the parents for targeted hybridization.Principal components approach is very helpful and was analysed with 31 entries in deciding which agronomic traits of crop contributes most to yield the estimation of descriptive statistics of ten quantitative traits indicated the existence of diversity among the genotypes.In the present study, first three Eigen vectors which has eigen values greater than one and cumulatively explained about 73.9 per cent of the total variation among the ten quantitative traits in 31 genotypes of sorghum.Hence PC-I has eigen value 3.22 and accounted for 32.21 % of the variations.This represents an equivalent of five variables viz., final plant population, initial plant population, grain yield, lodging, plant height and indicated that were important contributing variables for the variation among the genotypes.The 31 genotypes were grouped into 5 clusters on the basis of average linkage and dendogram was cut at a distance of 1.50.The cluster 1 has all the genotypes except NJ 2702 (cluster 2), NJ 2710 (cluster 3), CSV 22R (cluster 4) and CSV 29R (cluster 5).The clustering pattern showed that there was significant genetic variability among the sorghum genotypes tested which indicated the presence of excellent opportunity to bring about improvement through hybridizing genotypes from different clusters and assembling desirable traits with higher heterotic potential.