Abstract

To evaluate genetic diversity of 20 genotypes of mungbean, an experiment was laid out in a Randomized Complete Block Design with two replications during the period from November, 2010 to February, 2011 at the experimental field of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Institute of Biological science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Eight morphological characters including plant height, number of fruiting branches per plant, number of pods per plant, number of pod clusters per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod, 1000-seed weight and total seed yield per plant were measured. Analysis of variance showed significant differences among genotypes for all traits. A total of four groups were defined through cluster analysis and distinct genetic variations were observed among these groups. Using cluster analysis by unweighted pair group methodwith arithmetic mean (UPGMA) method, all genotypes were grouped into 3 main groups and 1 minor group. Cluster I consisted of 9 genotypes, cluster II of 7, cluster III of 1 and cluster IV of 3 genotypes.  Principal component analysis was done to evaluate diversity and morphological traits which had more effects on diversity and three components explained near 79% of total variation among genotypes. By plot of first two components score for genotypes confirmed the result of cluster analysis.

Key words: Tropical environment, mungbean, multivariate analysis and biodiversity.