Genetic Diversity Analysis in Medium Duration Pigeonpea Cajanus cajan (L) Millsp. Germplasm for Different Agronomic Traits and Biotic Factors

For the people living in tropical and sub-tropical regions, Pigeon pea Cajanus cajan (L) Millsp. is a very essential pulse crop because of its high nutrition along with several important features such as feed and fodder for animal consumption, fuel for household work etc. Despite being a multipurpose and attractive crop, its productivity has remained up to 700-800kg ha-1. Along-with low productivity, Pigeon pea is also affected by a number of biotic stresses such as fusarium wilt, pod borer, pod fly. It is therefore, need of the hour to search for the genetic diversity present in the existing cultivars along with wild relatives and landraces. The present investigation was conducted with forty Pigeon pea germplasm to assess the genetic diversity by principal component analysis (PCA). PCA is an important statistical technique which reduces the dimension of the much large data set into a more concise data set while retaining a significant amount of information from the original data. PCA analysis revealed a significant amount of variability present in the germplasm. PC1 contributed maximum variance towards diversity (22.05%) followed by PC2 (15.87%), PC3 (11.39%), PC4 (10.18%), PC5 (9.10%) and PC6 (8.18%). Scatter plot diagram showed that genotypes number 1 (CRG 82), 5 (GJP 1721), 19 (ICPL 15062), and 31 (BAUPP-18-8) exhibited the highest diversity.