Genetic diversity analysis for productivity traits in rabi sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench]

A field experiment was conducted in Regional Agricultural Research Station, Bijapur, Karnataka using 122 rabi sorghum genotypes to assess the genetic diversity. The analysis of variance revealed significant differences among the genotypes for all the traits studied. Mahalanobis D2 statistics was applied to assess the divergence among genotypes. Among the 11 quantitative characters studied, days to 50% flowering contributed maximum (34.53%) to the total divergence. All the genotypes were grouped into nine clusters and cluster I was largest with 88 genotypes, followed by cluster IV, II and V (17, 10 and 2 genotypes respectively) and remaining clusters (III, VI, VII, VIII and IX) were solitary in nature. Maximum intra cluster distance was shown by cluster II (4.46) and maximum inter cluster distance (11.32) was noticed between the clusters V and IX indicating that the crosses between genotypes of these different clusters could manifest heterosis and better recombinants after hybridization.