NUMERICAL ANALYSES OF LEAF AND FRUIT EXTERNAL MORPHOLOGY IN Moringa oleifera LAM

The wide range of uses of Moringa oleifera in recent time has witnessed increasing demand of its foliar and seed products in nutritional, medical and ecological applications. The upsurge of demand for these products needs to be balanced with new varieties of improved performance to meet the supply chain. To achieve this, morphological diversity assessment is prerequisite for future crop improvement programme. Therefore, numerical analyses of the external morphology of leaf and fruit of thirty accessions of Moringa oleifera were assessed. The study was carried out on both qualitative and quantitative characters to assess the diversity at morphological level to establish the phenetic relationships and the delimitation of accessions. Relationship studies showed considerable correlation between the leaf and fruits characters that produced clear and reproducible threats and were selected for diversity study. Numerical analysis of the qualitative and quantitative characters clustered the accessions into five groups-operational taxonomic units (OTUs) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 were clustered in group one; OTUs 6 and 8 were clustered in group two and three respectively; OTUs 15 and 16 in group four and OUT 23 in group five cluster membership. Principal Component Analysis was carried out to augment the Cluster Analysis which showed large morphological diversity existing in accessions of Moringa oleifera hence, infraspecific classification is hereby proposed. These analysis particularly traits related to leaf and fruits yield can also be utilised for crop improvement programme.