Characterisation of common bean genotypes based on storage protein profiles

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is a morphologically diverse leguminous crop as evidenced by a great variation in growth habits, pigmentation, flowers, locules, pods, seed, phenology and many other characters. The study was conducted to distinguish common bean genotypes grown in Southern Africa sub-region based on storage protein profiles. A collection of 42 genotypes were obtained from Lesotho, Republic of South Africa and Zambia. Sodium Dodycel Sulphate Polyacrilamide Gel Electrophoresis was used to separate extracted residual protein and develop electrophoregrams from which bands were scored, generating a matrix of 1 or 0. Correspondence and cluster analysis were performed using the dataset. Out of 10 correspondence scores generated from 17characters, only the first three which constituted 54.57% of the total variation and were considered for analysis. The first, second and third correspondent scores accounted for 23.23, 16.80 and 14.54%, respectively. Thirtyeight individual genotypes and seven intra-accessions were distinguished, while three genotypes and three accessions were indistinguishable. The study showed a wide variation among the common bean genotypes. Cultivars such as winter-green, nordak, olathe, tanz1, lazy-house wife, zm 3749b, zm 3749a, zm 4517b, zm4517c, zm 4512 and zm 4527 were outliers. Cluster analysis showed that some cultivars started to show difference at 30 up to 85% level of similarity.Key Words: Cluster analysis, Lesotho, Phaseolus vulgari