Agro-Morphological Characterisation of Pearl Millet Accessions in Ghana

Select Volume / Issue:

• Volume 2 Issue 2, March, 2015

Year:

2015

Type of Publication:

Article

Keywords:

Characterisation, Core Collection, Germplasm, Pearl Millet

Authors:

Asungre, A. P.; Akromah, R.; Atokple, I. D. K.

Journal:

IJRAS

Volume:

2

Number:

2

Pages:

79-86

Month:

March

Note:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Abstract:

One hundred and twenty six (126) pearl millet accessions were collected from Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions which are the domain for Pearl millet production in Ghana and evaluated at the Savanna Agricultural Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-SARI) station at Manga during the 2011 main season. The aim was to conserve Pearl millet germplasm, develop agro-morphological characterisation data base and to define core selections for future use. The days to fifty per cent booting (DFB) ranged from 37-125 days and based on that 123 of the collections were grouped into early (39-59), medium (60-100) and late maturing groups (>101). Clustering based on morphological data (values converted to 0s and 1s) helped to further group the early maturity group into three distinct clusters and five distinct clusters each for medium and late maturity groups using the Unweighted Pair-group Method with the Arithmetic Means (UPGMA) and Jaccard’s coefficient range of 0-1. The agronomic data showed that the entire accession varied for seed colour and shape, head densities and shape. Plants heights ranged from 142 to 395 cm and the heads (spikes) made up of only cylindrical and candle shapes were short (15.3 to 29.7 cm). The major seed colours were deep grey and grey with globular shape being the dominant seed shape. Region of origin did not influence any particular trait except days to DFB. A core collection of 30 (7, 13 and 10 from early, medium and late maturity grouping respectively) accessions were generated, using the clusters and maturity groupings as guides.

Full text: IJRAS-235_Final.pdf [Bibtex]