Agro-morphological Diversity Analysis of Ethiopian mustard (Brassica carinata) Landraces in Southern Ethiopia

Genetic diversity analysis of Ethiopian mustard landraces is an important step in selection and hybridization of plant with required traits to develop well adapted and farmers preferred high yielding varieties. The Field experiment was conducted at Hula district in Sidama region to study the genetic diversity of forty nine brassica carinata landraces collected from different agro-ecologies of southern Ethiopia. The experiment was carried out in a simple lattice design with the objective of assessing and estimating the genetic diversity of local landraces based on phenological and agro-morphological traits; estimating association and heritability of the study traits and to identify the best performances of landraces further breeding work for their leaf yield. The analysis of variance shows the significant differences among landraces for all leaf parameter as well as all phenological traits. The high degree of variability among the Ethiopian mustard landraces were observed for studied traits. The estimation of genotypic and phenotypic coefficient of variations was studied, the highest genotypic and phenotypic coefficient of variation suggested that the Brassica carinata landraces are highly diverse and provides a wide range of possibilities for selecting further breeding. The result heritability of broad sense (H2b) values in all traits was very high ranging from 90.99 to 99.975%; this implies that the genetic component of variation is substantial for all traits. To evaluate the pattern of variation, the principal component analysis was conducted for all quantitative traits. The first three principal components accounted for most of the variation observed and cumulatively explained 82.99% of the total variation among the all quantitative traits. Clustering produced a clear grouping of the forty nine landraces into four major groups of clusters Where, by the individuals within any one cluster are more closely related than individuals in different clusters. The landraces that early flowered are grouped in the same group, and the same is true for the late flowering landraces as well as the landraces with highest leaf yield was clustered in the same group. Overall, the study shows the wide variation and presences of high genetic variability among Brassica carinata landraces.