Siva Kumar Vavilapalli¹ , Celine V.A.² , Sreelathakumai I.²

1. Department of Horticulture, Dr. Y.S.R. Horticultural University, Tadepalligudem, West Godavari- 534101, A.P., India
2. Department of Olericulture, Kerala Agricultural University, College of Agriculture, Vellayani-695522, Trivandrum, Kerala, India
Author    Correspondence author
Legume Genomics and Genetics, 2014, Vol. 5, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/lgg.2014.05.0002
Received: 12 Jan., 2014    Accepted: 14 Mar., 2014    Published: 14 Jun., 2014

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Vavilapalli et al., 2014, Genetic Divergence Analysis in Vegetable Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata subsp. unguiculata [L.]) Genotypes, Legume Genomics and Genetics, Vol.5, No.2, 4-6 (doi: 10.5376/lgg.2014.05.0002)

In order to assess the divergence among 22 cowpea genotypes, mahalanobis D2 statistics was applied. The analysis of variance revealed significant differences among the genotypes for all the traits. The 22 genotypes were grouped into 6 clusters, where clusters I was the largest, containing eleven genotypes followed by the clusters III (5 genotypes) and cluster II with three genotypes. The inter cluster distance was maximum between cluster III and VI followed by cluster III and V. Based on inter cluster distance and per se performance of genotypes, the entries viz., VU 1, VU 2, VU6, VU 8 and VU  21 were selected, which could be intercrossed to recover good recombinants and desirable segregants. The pod yield per plant contributed maximum divergence (66.23%) which was followed by pod weight (20.78%) and plant height (8.23%).

D² statistics; Genetic diversity; Vegetable cowpea; Vigna unguiculata