Deciphering morphological and molecular insights into mothbean genotypes

Mothbeanis a drought and heat tolerant pulse crop grown in arid and semi-arid regions of India. The extent of genetic variability, correlation, path analysis for seed yield and nine yield attributes was studied in thirty-eight genotypes during the kharif, 2019 in randomized complete block design in four replications. The differences among all the genotypes were significant for all the traits. Days to flowering recorded high genotypic and phenotypic coefficient of variation followed by plant height and low magnitudes were reported for protein content, pod length and the number of seeds per pod. The broad sense heritability was high for days to flowering, days to maturity, the number of pods per plant, hundred seed weight, plant height, seed yield per plant, the number of branches per plant and the number of seeds per pod. A low genetic advance as per cent mean was recorded for protein content and pod length. The trait, seed yield per plant was significantly and positively correlated with the number of pods per plant at both genotypic (0.662) and phenotypic (0.618) levels. The path analysis revealed that the number of pods per plant, days to maturity, the number of seeds per pod and plant height exhibited a high direct effect on seed yield per plant. The microsatellites were used to analyse the polymorphisms among mothbean genotypes. The polymorphic information content value of the microsatellites ranged from 0.23 to 0.57, while the heterozygosity value ranged from 0.26 to 0.64. The cluster diagram revealed a similarity index value ranged from 0.08 to 1.00 and the genotypes were clustered in two main groups. Based on the results it could be concluded that microsatellites are efficient in discriminating among the mothbean genotypes and the study showed a narrow gene base of the genotypes.