Morphological Diversity and per se Performance in Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.)

A field experiment was conducted to find out the morphological diversity and per se performance of yield component traits, yield and a fibre quality traits eleven genotypes (four G. hirsutum cultivars viz., MCU 5, MCU 12, SURABHI and SVPR 2 and seven G. hirsutum genetic accessions viz., F 776, F 1861, SOCC 11, SOCC 17, TCH 1641, TCH 1644 and TCH 1646) during kharif 2005-06. Morphological traits of each genotype were measured on five randomly chosen plants in each replication. Significant differences were recorded for all the fourteen traits observed. The cultivar MCU 12 produced maximum yield (95.33 gm/plant) due to more number of sympodia (24.17/ plant), number of bolls (25.17/plant), boll weight (4.20 g), ginning outturn (35.43 %), lint index (6.12 g) and seed index (10.44 g). Among the eleven genetic accessions, most of them expressed lowest value in yield and quality traits except SOCC17 superior in micronaire (4.60?g/inch-1), SOCC11superior in fibre elongation (9.60 %) and TCH 1641 had high number of sympodia (28.97/plant) and number of seeds per boll (32). The cultivar SURABHI possess significantly more number of bolls (26.47/ plant), high ginning outturn (36.24 %), 2.5% span length (32.90 mm) and bundle strength(22.9 g/tex-1). The morphological traits data were used for assessing genetic diversity in the 11 cotton genotypes. NTSYS software was used to determine the genetic similarities and construct a dendrogram. The matrix of average taxonomic distance was estimated using Euclidian distance. The average taxonomic distance ranged from 0.1 to 1.4. At a Euclidean distance of 0.8, the 11 genotypes were grouped into IV clusters at 0.43% similarity level. Among the different clusters, the cluster size varied from one to four genotypes. The maximum number of genotypes was included in cluster I (four genotypes) and the minimum number in cluster II having only one genotype. The cluster III & IV each had three genotypes. The analysis of variance revealed significant divergences among all the genotypes for all characters. In future, greater morphological diversity shown among the genotypes can be used to generate potential and promising hybrids.