Vol. 12, Issue 2 (2023)

Author(s):
Khirud Panging, Gobin Chandra Bora and Debojit Sarma

Abstract:
Pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata Duch.) is one of the most popular summer vegetable crops and belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family. Thirty diverse pumpkin landraces representing eight districts of Assam comprised the investigation, carried out at the Instruction-cum-Research (ICR) Farm of Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat, during Rabi 2018–2019. Genetic divergence in 30 pumpkin landraces for 27 different traits using Mahalanobis D² statistics and Tocher’s clustering generated five clusters of the 30 pumpkin landraces. Diversity analysis revealed that the highest genetic diversity was evident between the cluster pairs II-V, I-V, I-V and IV-V, respectively; the landraces from these clusters may be selected as parents in future hybridization programs to obtain superior combinations and heterosis in segregating generation. The single landrace Dibrugarh-1 belonging to cluster IV stood most diverse among 30 landraces and recorded a high cluster mean for yield per plant, which can serve as a suitable parent for the hybridization programme. Landraces Karbi Anglong-1, Haflong-1, Jorhat-1, Majuli -1 and Lakhimpur-1 belonged to the best mean cluster group V; they showed the highest intra-cluster distance, indicating the presence of heterogeneity among the landraces and they can be parents in hybridization programme.