Description:
<jats:p>Fifty five accessions from ICRISAT with different geographical origins were grown at Department of Forage Crops, Centre for Plant Breeding and Genetics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu during June, 2002 in a randomized complete block design with two replications in order to assess the genetic diversity. Five randomly selected plants from each accession were used to record observation on days to 50 percent flowering, plant height, leaf length, leaf breadth, number of leaves, leaf/stem ratio, Stover yield, grain yield per plant and total soluble solids. Genetic diversity was studied using Mahalanobis’s D2 statistics and clustering of accessions was done according to Tocher’s method. The analysis of variance showed highly significant differences among the accessions for all the characters studied. The clustering pattern revealed that genetic diversity was not necessarily correlated with geographical origins. Stover yield made the largest contribution to total variability (48.82 percent) followed by total soluble solids (19.53 percent) and days to 50 percent flowering (10.98 percent). Multivariate analysis grouped the accessions in to 21 clusters. Cluster II and V were the largest and consisted of 10 accessions each followed by cluster I (8 accessions) and cluster IV (5 accessions). The largest inter cluster distance were observed between cluster XII and XVIII (73.73) followed by VI and XVIII (71.67) indicating that the crosses between accessions of these different clusters could give heterotic responses and better segregants after hybridization.</jats:p>