Exploring phenotypic variation of diverse bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea L) origin and development of mini ‐core collection for future breeding

Bambara groundnut from diverse countries of African origin has shown that considerable variability existed among the landraces that would be useful for further improvement of the crops. Some traits like seed dry weight, pod dry weight, petiole length and plant height could be improved through selection in the germplasm. The prospect of selecting potential high-yielding landraces in the current genetic pool could be achieved and the mini-core collection developed would promote additional research in bambara groundnut programme for utilization. AbstractUnderstanding the phenotypic variation and designing a mini-core collection is an efficient method to accelerate the genetic gain of bambara groundnut. A collection of 300 bambara groundnut landraces from 25 different countries of origin sourced from gene banks were used to analyze phenotypic variability among the landraces and develop a mini-core collection for future breeding. The landraces were evaluated in alpha lattice design with two replications for 2  years (2019 and 2020). The results showed highly significant differences (p <  0.001) among the bambara groundnut landraces for all the studied traits implying the selection of landraces with better agronomic traits could be achieved from the crop genetic pool. In addition, landrace x year interactions were significant for studied traits, except for shelling percentage and number of seeds per pod. The genotypic coefficient of variation values were high for most yiel...
Source: Food and Energy Security - Category: Food Science Authors: Tags: ORIGINAL ARTICLE Source Type: research