Assessing Genetic Variability in Eggplant to Determine Their Resource Value and Breeding Potential for Yield and Related Traits

Eggplant is one of the most important vegetables grown in India. The present study was undertaken to study the genetic variability in eggplant for their agro-morphological traits. Sixty accessions of eggplant including released varieties, advanced breeding lines and wild relatives were assessed for 5 morphological descriptors and 6 fruit descriptors. Genetic component viz., GCV, PCV, heritability and genetic advance as per cent over mean were figured out. Genetic diversity study was carried out based on cluster analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) were carried out for extracting maximum data. A majority of the characters exhibited maximum range of variation as well as many of these characters also displayed high genotypic and phenotypic variance (>20%) except for the fruit length showing modest estimates of PCV (18.73%). The total yield per plant showed positive association with leaf length (0.319), fruit length (0.447), fruit diameter (0.451), average fruits per plant (0.308) and average fruit weight (0.706) at genotypic level at p=0.01 significance. The characters which exhibited a positive correlation with yield were found to have a positive direct effect on yield. Based on D2 values, 60 accessions were assembled into 7 highly distinct clusters. The maximum intra-cluster distance was observed in cluster I (2.537) followed by IV (2.421) and the maximum inter-cluster distance was observed between clusters II and IV (7.062). The first two components of PCA depicted 50.39% of the total variance and AHC categorized the germplasm into four key groups. Thus, it can be presumed by this concept that there is a broad array of variability exists in this crop for almost all the traits which will have ample scope for improvement of eggplant.