Morphological characterizations of some watermelon seeds

Watermelon is a monecious and mostly foreign pollinated vegetable, but its genetic base is quite narrow. This situation causes a challenge about characterization of genotypes or lines. Genetically controlled morphological characters can carry the characterization of genotypes one step further. In watermelon, some seed characters are under genetically control such as grand and over color of testa or patches at hilum. In this study, morphological characterization of 152 watermelon genotypes and 11 accessions seeds were performed. 100 seeds from each genotype were examined for seven characters; length, width, seed size, ground color of testa, over color of testa, area of over color in relation to that ground color of testa and patches at hilum. According to principle component analysis of these seven characters were explained 69.17% of cumulative variance with three components (Eigen values >1). Two main and four sub clusters were occurred to hierarchical cluster analysis. As a conclusion length, width and area of over color in relation to that ground color characters had top three effect on explaining to variance between genotypes. Contrary to this seed size had minimum effect on explained total variance.