Assessment of Exotic Sesame (Sesamum indicum) Accessions through Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

The present research conducted over 96 exotic sesame accessions with five checks, to identify the minimum number of components, which could explain maximum variability out of the total variability using Principal Component Analysis (PCA); The investigation was performed under Project Co-ordinating Unit (Sesame and Niger) Research Farm, JNKVV, Jabalpur (M.P.) during kharif 2018 using Augmented block design. Among the studied traits, Component 1 had the contribution from the traits viz., number of primary branches per plant, number of capsules per plant, number of seeds per capsule, oil content and seed yield/plant, which accounted 30.71% to the total variability. Days to flower initiation and days to 50% flowering had contributed 17.11% to the total variability in component 2. The remaining variabilities of 11.26%, 9.94%, 7.48% and 6.73% were consolidated in PC3, PC4, PC5 and PC6 respectievely by various traits like number of secondary branches/plant, capsule length, days to maturity, thousand seed weight and plant height . The cumulative variance of 83.23% of total variation among 12 characters was explained by the first six axes. On the basis of PC scores PC1, PC3 and PC5 accounting mainly to yield and quality traits containing accesions viz., EC-334998, ES-38, EC-346426, EC-334958, EC-340538, RT-351 and GT-10 might be further utilized in breeding programme.