Genetic diversity analysis in chickpea grown under heat stress conditions of Madhya Pradesh

The genetic diversity study was conducted in 100 promising chickpea genotypes sown under late planting using Mahalanobis’s D2 Statistics. Further the diversity is also confirmed by using SSR molecular markers. Based on D2 values, 100 genotypes were grouped into sixteen clusters. The cluster I consisted of maximum 29 genotypes, followed by Cluster II, cluster V and cluster VI, which had 26, 13 and 12 genotypes, respectively. Maximum intra-cluster distance (164.10) was observed in cluster V, followed by cluster VI (150.23), cluster III (123.98) and cluster II (102.52). However, maximum inter cluster distance was noticed between cluster IX and cluster XV (853.43), followed by cluster X and cluster XV (749.13) and cluster VII and cluster XV (742.58). Molecular analysis grouped 100 genotypes into three major clusters. First major cluster consisted four genotypes (ICCV 93025, ICCV 93024, ICCV 03401 and ICCV 95315) and second cluster consisted two genotypes (ICCV 03405 and ICCV 01306). Third and last major cluster group contained 94 genotypes. The PIC value among the primers ranged from 0.3245 (TA 78) to 0.4375 (TA 135) and the highest gene diversity were found in TA 135 (0.5378). Among all eleven polymorphic SSR primers, only TA78 (0.0300), H5BO4 (0.0900), ICCAM0123a (0.0500), TA135 (0.0600) and H1G16 (0.1500) were shown heterozygosity. The genotypes conferring diversity at molecular studies (unaffected by environmental variations) can be used in future hybridization programmes and also helpful for plant breeders to screen effective heat tolerance genotypes for the development of high yielding improved lines for diverse environments