Abstract:
Shallot is used to be and indispensable crop used as condiment, cash source, and medicinal
plant.Information about genetic variability and knowledge of quantitative characters with
yield and among themselves is important for improvement of the crop through breeding;
however, there is little information for genetic variability of different shallot accessions in
Ethiopia using quantitative and qualitative traits. Forty nine shallot accessions were tested
in a 7x7 simple lattice design at Debre-Zeit Agricultural Research Center in 2009/10. The
over all objective was to study the extent of genetic variation and association among bulb
yield and bulb yield related traits. The accessions differ significantly for most of the
characters and relatively wide range of the mean for most of characters indicated the
existence of variation among the tested accessions. High phenotypic coefficient of variation
(PCV) and genotypic coefficient variation (GCV) were recorded for leaf diameter and
percentage of bulb sprouting. High GCV along with high heritability and genetic advance
was obtained from leaf diameter and percentage of bulb sprouting. Bulb yield was
positively and significantly associated with plant height, leaf length, leaf sheath length, leaf
sheath diameter, bulb length, bulb diameter, bulb dry weight, biological yield per plant, and
marketable yield per plant at both phenotypic and genotypic levels. Path-coefficient
analysis revealed that bulb dry weight exerted maximum positive direct effect on bulb yield
followed by leaf length, leaf sheath diameter, and number of bulb splits per plant. D
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analysis showed the 49 shallot accessions grouped into six clusters. This makes the
accessions to become moderately divergent. Principal component analysis showed that the
first six principal components explained about 76.15% of the total variation. The
phenotypic diversity index for qualitative traits were (H’=0.58) for leaf color, (H’=0.47) for
foliage attitude, (H’=0.36) for both leaf cross section and bulb skin color each revealed
high diversity. Whereas, bulb shape (H’=0.07) showed the lowest diversity. From the result
of this study, it could be concluded that BDW and LL can be considered for selection.
