Abstract:
In the current investigation, 50 okra genotypes were grouped into 9 clusters by treating estimated D2 values as the square of the generalized distance. Among the 9 clusters, cluster II had the highest intra-cluster value (74.77) followed by Cluster I (67.14), and the highest inter-cluster value was noticed between Cluster VII and IX (167.97) followed by Cluster II and IX (152.31). The maximum contribution towards divergence was shown by the characters like PDI of OELCV at 90 DAS (23.53 %), PDI of YVMV at 90 DAS (17.22), fruit length (9.27), days to 1st blooming (9.00 %) and the internodal length (7.69 %). The PCA was carried out to get a simplified view of the relationship between the attributes. From the PCA plot of PC1 vs. PC2 (Dim1 vs Dim2), selection may be refined considering all 8 principal components, with Punjab 8 being the best-performing cultivar having an optimum combination of all variables including OELCV and BYVMV disease tolerance. Seven diverse genotypes were selected based on yield potentiality, disease tolerance, multivariate analysis, and PCA.