Глобальный журнал биологии, сельского хозяйства и медицинских наук

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GENETIC VARIABILITY FOR MORPHO-AGRONOMIC TRAITS IN CORE GERMPLASM COLLECTIONS OF FINGER MILLET (Eleusine coracana (L.) GAERTN)

Dhanalakshmi TN, Ramesh S, Ravishankar CR, Upadhyaya HD, Mohan Rao A, Gangappa E, Jayarame Gowda & Priyadarshini SK

The use of diverse germplasm is the key to success of crop improvement programmes. Unwieldiness of germplasm size which has restricted the researchers for accurate characterization and resulted in limited utilization of genetic resources in crop improvement programmes. A smaller (622 accessions) and manageable sub sets (known as core collections) which capture maximum variability of the entire global collections (5949 accessions) has been developed in finger millet. The relatively smaller size of the core collections could be effectively characterized for a number of economic traits. In the present investigation, 622 core finger millet germplasm accessions were evaluated for six quantitative characters. The results revealed substantial genetic variability for all the traits investigated. The contribution of genetic variability was greater in relation to environmental variability towards total variability for all the investigated traits among the germplasm accessions. These results are discussed in relation to the development of strategic genetic material for localizing genes controlling economic traits and designing suitable breeding and selection strategies for genetic improvement of finger millet.