Assessment of Genetic Diversity in Sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) for Yield and its Components

A field experiment was conducted to assess the diversity among sesame genotypes for yield and yield component traits during late kharif, 2017 (August-November) at Seed Research and Technology Centre, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, Telangana State, India. Genetic diversity among the genotypes were estimated based on the data recorded for eight yield and yield attributing characters in 51 genotypes using Mahalanobis’s D2 statistics. The percent contribution of characters towards divergence showed that the character days to 50% flowering contributed maximum followed by seed yield plant-1, capsule length and number of seeds capsule-1. Selection of parents based on these traits would be useful to achieve a wide range of genetic variability in crop improvement programmes. The 51 genotypes were grouped into ten clusters and out of them, cluster I was the largest comprising of eighteen genotypes followed by cluster III with fifteen genotypes, cluster IV with seven genotypes, cluster II with five genotypes. The clusters viz., V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X represented by single genotype indicating high degree of diversity among the genotypes. The maximum inter cluster distance was observed between cluster IX and cluster X (219.39) followed by cluster VII and cluster VIII (190.41). Among the ten clusters, the cluster X had highest mean value for capsule length, number of capsules plant-1, number of seeds capsule-1 and seed yield plant-1. The genotypes from these divergent clusters with favourable mean values for different traits could be used as parents in hybridization programme to get superior transgressive segregants.