Principal Components Analysis in Some Accessions of Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench).

Abstract

The study was carried out to evaluate nineteen accessions of sorghum grown for two consecutive cropping seasons of 2015 and 2016 at the Teaching and Research Farm of Crop Production Department, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger- State. The experiment was to characterize 19 sorghum accessions based on their morpho-agronomic traits and to understand the direct and indirect contributions of traits toward the yield. A randomized complete block design with three replications was used for the experiment. Data on the various morpho-agronomical traits were collected and subjected to individual and combined analysis of variance (ANOVA). Highly significant differences among accessions were found for all characters. The principal components revealed variations among the characters studied as the first three components explained 71.5 % and 68.5 % of the cumulative variations for the two years; the remaining two components explained 16 % and 16.4 % variation. The most outstanding performance accessions for grain weight are: AKV11 (Kaura), AKV9 (Shawimpe) and AKV14 (Farafara), which could be used for Sorghum improvement programme and recommended for farmers in the Southern Guinea Zones of Nigeria.