Cluster analysis in carrot genotypes under temperate conditions of Kashmir

摘要

Utilization of genetic resources in developing sustainable solutions to basic crop constraints have been suggested from time to time but these genetic resources could not be exploited fully due to their inherent problems of large size and lack of sufficient evaluation and classification (Dahlberg, 3). Germplasm maintenance, evaluation and characterization for economically important traits is a pre-requisite for genetic improvement programme of any crop. The choice of parents is an indispensable pre-requisite which determines the success of recombination breeding. Euclidean cluster analysis is used to measure genetic divergence and classify the genetic stocks into distinct groups which may be considered as parents for evolving superior genotypes. Principal component analysis helps in identifying the most relevant characters that can be used as descriptors by explaining as much of the total variation in the original set of variables as possible with as few of the components as possible and reduces the dimension of the problem while cluster analysis offers solution by defining degrees of relatedness in the gene bank samples, define commonness thereby eliminating redundancy and characterizing degree of diversity (Peeters and Martinelli, 7). The present investigation is an attempt to evaluate the performance of carrot genotypes maintained by SKUAST-K to determine the genetic diversity and to identify desirable parents for recombination breeding to break the existing yield plateau in carrot.