Agromorphological and Biochemical Markers' Selection in Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) Cultivars

The existence of genetic diversity should have to be supplemented with the associated traits as efficient modern breeding method. The crop was sown during 2015 wet season across four locations in Ethiopia. The Euclidean distances matrix (D) was worked out for 16 groundnut genotypes evaluated for 16 agromorphological and oil traits to study the association of traits with respective genotypes based on principal component analysis and clustering methods. The Eigen vectors based on euclidean distance matrix (D) worked out for agromorphological and oil traits has shown that the first principal component had high positive component loading from both agromorphological and high oil quality traits/parameters including number of branches per plant, above ground biomass per plant, pod weight per plant, 100seed weight, grain yield, oil yield, oleic acid, O/L ratio, and oil content. These traits found to associate with Behajidu, Bulki, Lote, Manipeter, NC-343, Oldhale, Roba, Shulamith, Tole-1 and Werer-962 genotypes with high positive PCA1 scores indicating that breeding for high oil quality traits can be conducted via improvement of grain yield, oil yield, 100 seed weight, seed weight per plant and/or  pod weight per plant. On the other hand, the first component has got high negative load from agromorphological traits like number of seeds per pod and number of seed per plant, and low oil quality traits/parameters including linoleic acid, TPUS and TPUS/TS. The corresponding genotype loads were Fetene, Sedi, Werer-961 and Werer-963 indicating that genotypes with low oil quality can be identified through selection for number of seeds per pod and number of seeds per plant. The PCA and cluster analysis has shown that breeding for oil content, oil yield, grain yield and oil quality traits can be conducted through selection for seed weight per plant, pod weight per plant, number of branches per plant, above ground biomass per plant and number of mature pods per plant.  Thus, this study has substantially shown that breeding for oil traits can be conducted through selection for agromorphological traits.