Vol. 10, Issue 5 (2021)

Author(s):
Mainak Barman, Vinay Kumar Choudhary, Satish Kumar Singh, Rabiya Parveen, Amitava Roy and Pulak Debbarma

Abstract:
Wheat (Triticum spp.) is considered as one key staple food crop in numerous places of our globe not only in terms of the area under cultivation but as a source of food also. It covers all the continents of the globe, engaging 17% of the world acreage of crops and feeds almost 40% populations globally. More than 3 billion population worldwide roughly, experiences the malnutrition problems. Malnutrition of micronutrient, predominantly the deficiency in Zinc and Iron worldwide afflicts more than three billion people. Keeping all the above considerations insight, the current evaluation of genetic diversity in bread wheat was performed for morpho-physiological traits and grain micronutrient content. The total 30 bread wheat genotypes under investigation were grouped into nine clusters. Cluster II included eight genotypes which were the highest followed by cluster I, cluster IV and cluster VII containing 6, 6 and 5 genotypes respectively. However, the rest five clusters namely, cluster III, cluster V, cluster VI, cluster VIII and cluster IX were solitary. The utmost inter-cluster distance was noted between the clusters VII and IX and the least inter-cluster distance was noted between the clusters V and VI. Genotypes RAUW-18-15, RAUW-18-21, DBW 16, BHU 25, RAUW-16-4 were recorded genetically most diverse having the highest intra-cluster distance. The highest contribution in manifesting genetic divergence was revealed by grain Fe content, followed by grain Zn content, days to fifty percent flowering, 1000-grain weight, grain yield per plant, number of grains/ ear. This means, it may be rewarding to execute selection for these traits.