Abstract
Grain amaranth is an underutilized pseudo-cereal recognized as an important nutritional crop owing to its balanced nutrient profile. A total of two hundred and fifty-one accessions of grain amaranth identified as core, from a pool of nine-hundred accessions, were assessed for phenotypic performance and genetic diversity across two locations. The establishment of the core accession aimed to reduce the dataset and enhance the accessibility of germplasm resources. This study primarily aimed to identify elite accessions exhibiting desirable agro-morphological traits and on the basis of their variability. ANOVA and diversity indices demonstrated a significant amount of variability for all the quantitative and qualitative traits. Traits such as plant height, inflorescence length, and seed yield showed high GA and high heritability estimates for both locations, with the lowest being observed for days to maturity. The accessions were grouped into four primary clusters with majority of accessions i.e., 92 (37%) belonged to Cluster-I for Loc1 while for Loc2, Cluster-IV contained majority of the accessions i.e., 94 (38%). Principal Component Analysis resolved trait variability into 3 PCs, accounting for 65.01% for Loc1 and 63.47% for Loc2, respectively. All traits, except protein content, showed a significant positive correlation and high degree of variability in both locations. The present investigation identified elite accessions suited to two different environments that have the potential for use in future genetic improvement initiatives for grain amaranth genetic resources.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are extremely grateful to Director, CSIR-NBRI for providing the facilities for conducting the experiment. The institutional manuscript number in CSIR-NBRI_MS/2024/03/02.
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The authors are thankful to CSIR, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (MLP043) for providing the fund for manpower and conducting the experiments.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. HKY designed the experiment and manuscript. JB and UK performed the field planting, data collection, experiments, data analysis, and prepared the manuscript. HKY supervised the research and provided the resources. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Boro, J., Kumar, U. & Yadav, H.K. Phenotypic characterization of core accessions of grain amaranth (Amaranthus hypochondriacus L.). Genet Resour Crop Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-024-01938-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-024-01938-z