ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC VARIABILITY AND DIVERSITY STUDIES IN SESAME (SESAMUM INDICUM. L)

Sesame (Sesamum indicum L.), commonly known as Till or Gingelly, is India's third most important oilseed crop, valued for its high-quality oil with long shelf life due to compounds like sesamin and sesamol.However, sesame production in India faces challenges, particularly low productivity, largely due to a lack of cultivars that can thrive in diverse growing conditions.To address this issue, understanding the genetic diversity and assessing the variability by studying the components of phenotypic variance, genotypic variance and its derived genetic estimates such as phenotypic coefficient of variation, Genotypic coefficient of variation and heritability are crucial.This study focused on evaluating the genetic variation of 40 sesame genotypes.By studying the analysis of variance significant genetic differences among the genotypes were observed for the characters chosen.The characters viz., days to maturity, number of primary branches per plant and number of capsules per plant observed to have high GCV value and signifies the impact of genotype and environmental interaction.Thereby elucidate the chance of selecting the traits for breeding program.The other characters recorded moderate and thousand seed weight recorded low GCV.Traits like days to fifty percent flowering, plant height and days to maturity had high heritability, meaning they are less affected by the environment.The characters which show high GCV value coupled with high heritability increases the dependability on selection of traits.Other traits, like the number of primary branches and capsule length showed moderate to low heritability.To study the genetic diversity, Cluster analysis were performed and dendrogram was constructed which revealed five distinct groups of genotypes, providing useful information for selecting genetically diverse parents for breeding program.