Variation and association analyses on morphological characters of linseed ( Linum usitatissimum L.) in Ethiopia

Abstract

Morphological studies of linseed ( Linum usitatissimum L.) of Ethiopia were undertaken in this study on 56 accessions collected from 10 administrative regions (former regions) classified into seven altitude classes. The seeds were planted during 2001 growing season in Bale-Goro wereda using randomized complete block design (RCBD) on three replications with the aim of investigating the morphological diversity in the accessions. Over the entire accession, except seed number per boll, all the characters showed significant variation. However, regional groups of linseed accessions showed insignificant variations only for secondary branches number per plant (SBP), days to flowering (DTF) and days to maturity (DTM) among themselves, and altitudinal groups of linseed accessions only for seed number per boll (SNB) and days to flowering (DTF). The analysis for coefficient of variation and cluster analysis showed that accessions from Gojam and Tigray were less diversified. About 53% of the total associations showed significant correlation and out of this 71% of the correlations were with the positive significant correlation coefficients. Cluster analysis indicates that accessions collected from the two extremes of altitude classes have variations for the studied traits. It is only Tigray Region that did not contribute member accession to cluster III, whereas Gondar and Bale regions contribute member accessions to 80% of clusters. Factor analysis showed that of the total variation (73.86%) 30.04% and 27.29% were accounted for by first and second principal components, respectively. The highest Shannon diversity index (0.322 ± 0.039) was recorded for boll size and Shannon diversity index for overall pooled mean was 0.223 ± 0.063. Keywords : cluster/factor analysis, diversity index, linseed accessions, morphological characters, variation/association SINET: Ethiopian Journal of Science Vol. 28(2) 2005: 129-140