Genetic diversity in interspecific hybridization derived advanced maize inbred lines

Genetic diversity in maize is incessantly being reduced due to modern breeding practices. This necessitates the creation of diverse pre-breeding lines with desirable allelic introgression from wild germplasm. With a view to enhance maize germplasm, 169 teosinte derived maize inbred lines were developed and studied to assess the genetic diversity in 14 morphological traits and to classify the lines into different clusters. Analysis of variance revealed significant variation amongst the genotypes for all the traits. High heritability with high genetic advance were observed for anthesis silking interval, flag leaf length, plant height, ear per plant, ear length, ear diameter, number of kernel row/ear, number of kernel/row and thousand kernel weight; high heritability and moderate genetic advance were observed for days to anthesis and days to silking while for flag leaf width, node bearing cob and grain yield/plant moderate heritability and high genetic advance were observed. Principal component analysis revealed that first five components had greater than one eigenvalue and accounted for 66.50% of the total phenotypic variation. The values of Euclidean dissimilarity matrices ranged from 6.28-366.88 and genotypes were grouped into fourteen clusters at a Euclidean distance of 62.5. The cluster 8 had early maturing genotypes; cluster 8, 10 and 11 had genotypes with shorter anthesis silking interval and cluster 2, 3 and 4 possessed genotypes superior with respect to yield contributing traits. A significant positive correlation of 0.499 was observed between morphological and molecular data indicating that the two data sets reflect the same genetic diversity pattern and can be utilized simultaneously to capture diversity present in maize germplasm