STUDIES ON THE GENERALIZED DISTANCE AMONG BLACKGRAM (VIGNA MUNGO L.) GENOTYPESSankar, J. and P. Satheesh KumarAbstract Genetic diversity among ninety six genotypes of blackgram collected from various parts of India was evaluated using Mahalanobisâ D2 statistic, based on 10 morphological characters viz., days to 50 per cent flowering, plant height, number of branches per plant, number of clusters per plant, number of pods per cluster, number of pods per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod, hundred seed weight and seed yield per plant. Ninety six genotypes were grouped into eleven clusters. There was no parallelism between genetic and geographical diversity. The intra-cluster distance was maximum (D2=1418.34) with cluster III. The maximum inter-cluster distance (D2 = 2194.45) was recorded between clusters VI and XI. The genotypes grouped in these clusters may be used to evolve superior segregants. Seed yield per plant followed by plant height contributed maximum to the total genetic diversity. These traits could be declared as choice of traits and the genotypes namely, G93, G68 and G35 could be declared as choice of parents. |