Vegetos

Abstract

Sixty four black gram genotypes, which included 61 germplasm accessions and three released check varieties, were analysed to study the genetic divergence pattern over rainy (kharif) and post rainy (rabi) seasons of 2008 and 2009. Multivariate analysis of the pooled data has grouped the 64 genotypes into nine distinct clusters with high genetic variance between the clusters (D²) and low variance within the clusters (D). Cluster II was the largest, consisting of 17 genotypes and cluster VI and VII were with only one genotype each. The intra cluster D values ranged from 0 (cluster VI and VII) to 7.68 (cluster IX). However the inter cluster D² values varied from 2.82 to 22.32, the lowest value recorded between cluster I and II and the highest between clusters VI and IX. It was observed that the single genotype in cluster number VI with low perfor-mance for majority of the characters studied was the farthest to most of the diverse clusters. Crosses between genotypes of cluster VI with that of cluster III (for high 100 seed weight), cluster IV (for maximum number of pods per plant, pods per cluster, cluster per plant and seed yield per plant) and cluster IX (for better plant height, peduncle length, pod length and seeds per pod) may prove advantageous in real-izing new recombinants with desired traits. Maxent (Maximum Entropy) model predicted for the promising accessions of black gram geno-types indicated site suitability for cultivation of these accessions across geographical regions in the climate change regime.