VARIABILITY, CHARACTER ASSOCIATION AND DIVERSITY ANALYSIS OF RIDGE GOURD (luffa

Sixty genotypes of ridge gourd (Luffa acutangula Roxb.) were collected from different locations of Bangladesh and were used to study their variability, character association and genetic diversity. Seventeen traits studied, of these, eight showed high heritability (over 80%). Correlation coefficient study indicated that yield per plant had highly significant positive relationship with the number of fruits per plant (r = 0.874**), average fruit weight (r = 0.707**), vine length at harvest (r = 0.359**) and length of fruit (r = 0.334**). On the other hand, the sex ratio and circumference of fruit exhibited negative association with yield. Path co-efficient analysis showed that number of fruits per plant exhibited the highest positive direct effect (0.7192) on yield followed by average fruit weight (0.4656). Based on Mahalanobis ’ D2 statistics, the sixty genotypes were grouped into four different clusters. Clustering pattern revealed that genotypes collected from the same location were grouped into different clusters. The average intercluster distances were always higher than the average intracluster distances suggesting wider genetic diversity among the genotypes within the cluster. Custer-III had the highest intracluster distance (97.9)