Keywords:
Chickpea, Genetic advance, Heritability, SSR, Path analysis, Variability
The existence and degree of genetic variability and its documentation in a gene-pool is obligatory in plant breeding. Along with variability, the comprehension of genetic parameters is indispensible for understanding and its administration during crop improvement. With this opinion, 12 phenotypic traits, one biochemical parameter and 23 microsatellite markers were used to examine the genetic variability in 58 chickpea genotypes. With immense heritability (> 60.20%), the genotypes exhibited lavish variability for most of the traits. Secondary branches per plant, pods per plant, seeds per pod, seeds per plant, hundred seed weight, seed yield per plant and harvest index demonstrated a high PCV than GCV. Seed yield per plant illustrated a significant genotypic level association with pods per plant (0.728**), seeds per plant (0.648**), 100 seed weight (0.338**) and harvest index (0.683**). Pods per plant (0.198), seeds per plant (0.672), harvest index (0.170) and 100 seed weight (0.665) showed significant direct effect on seed yield per plant during path analysis. Manhattan distance produced seven clusters, at cut-off value of 0.15, during phenotypic based clustering. Microsatellite markers amplified 296 loci. The polymorphic information content confined between 0.32 (TR3) − 0.93 (CAM0443) with an average of 0.83. The DNA marker based clustering generated three discrete clusters. Faint correlation (0.097) was found between the Manhattan’s and Nei’s distance. The outcomes of the current experiment advocated that both phenotypic as well as DNA markers should be practiced jointly to arrest the true genetic diversity and to reap heterosis during hybridization.
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Authors acknowledge Anand Agricultural University, Gujarat, India for providing facilities to conduct experiment.