Pages: (1-15 )
Abstract
Minor legumes are group of crop plants which have been marginalized when compared with their major category in terms of research effort and otherwise. In this work, vegetative attributes of some minor legumes were considered viz-a-viz their genetic responses. Twenty-four accessions of minor legumes belonging to twelve species were collected from the Germplasm Unit of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, and their morphological and phylogenetic relationships were investigated The accessions were planted in plots of 5 ridges of 5 meters long, spaced 1 meter apart, and replicated three times at the University Teaching and Research Farm of the Federal University, Oye Ekiti. The variability of the accessions was assessed by comparing their vegetative morphology. Differences between the mean values of two accessions were assessed using descriptive statistics. Discriminatory vegetative morphological traits were identified using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), while similarities among the accessions were examined using Cluster Analysis (CA). The first three axes of the PCA explained 71% of the total variation in vegetative characters, with rachis length, internode length, stipule length, and stipule width contributing the most to the variations in the legume accessions. Based on the vegetative morphological descriptors at a 0.25 level of similarity, Cluster analysis grouped the 24 accessions into 5 clusters. The study revealed similarities within the same species and inter-specific morphological variation and genetic relatedness among the 24 miscellaneous legume accessions.
Keywords: accessions, species, variability, phylogenetic, vegetative,