Analysis of Morphological Variation, Grouping and Path Coefficient Studies in a Set of Maize Inbred Lines Local to North East Hill Region of India

In the current study a total of 191 maize inbred lines were set up in an augmented randomized complete block design to study the genetic variation and interrelationship of different yield contributing parameters. Observations were recorded on a total of nine phenological and ear / kernel related traits. Significant results for ANOVA indicated presence of substantial variation while the first three axes of PCA could explain 75.54% of the variation present. Ear and flowering traits were orthogonal to each other and the highest variation in PC1 could be attributed to total grain weight. This was also reflected in the Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering which grouped the inbreds into five clusters primarily on the basis of total grain weight which accounted for the highest variation between the clusters. Substantial heritability genetic advance as percentage of mean were observed for total grain weight indicating that selection for grain weight would be fruitful. Association and path coefficient studies after adjustments for multi-collinearity using k constant method (0.05) revealed that total grain weight was highly and positively correlated with ear weight, number of grain kernel rows and seed index. Therefore, simultaneous selection for these traits would be useful. Overall, our studies go on to show presence of sufficient genetic variability in the inbreds under study and hybridization between inbred lines grouped in different clusters have a high chance of producing heterotic hybrids.