Vol. 12, Issue 4 (2023)

Author(s):
Chandrakant Awachare, G Karunakaran, M Madhavi, T Sakthivel, KS Shivashankara, NV Singh and BM Muralidhara

Abstract:
The 72 avocado accessions were characterized for 25 qualitative morphological characters using IPGRI descriptors. The results depicted vast diversity among accessions for all morphological traits, of which, 2 characters had dimorphic and remaining 23 characters had polymorphic in nature. The highest number of accessions showed the presence of rough trunk surface (45.83%), oval leaf shape (47.22%), acute leaf base (84.72%) and acute leaf apex (72.22%). With respect to fruit traits, the majority of accessions confronted with obovate fruit shape (26.38%), depressed fruit base (48.61%), high uniformity in fruit size (73.61%), no ridges on fruit (59.72%). Peel traits revealed the dominance of light green fruit colour (37.50%) with smooth peel surface (51.38%). The Pearson correlation analysis showed that trunk surface had positive correlation with fruit size uniformity and leaf shape and negative correlation with fruit size uniformity (r=-0.249). The fruit shape had strong positive correlation with fibre in pulp (r=0.239), however, fruit apex shape showed positive correlation with fruit skin surface (r=0.302). The accessions depicting important horticultural traits viz. fruit size, shape, pulp quality, peel colour, peel thickness etc. may form the basis for future Avocado breeding programme.