Multivariate analysis for agronomic, physiological, macro, and micronutrient traits of exotic vegetable amaranth...

The genus amaranth is comprised of 60-70 species. This climate hardy plant is grown as a vegetable as well as cereal crop in many areas of the world. Current study multivariate analysis was used to characterize the exotic vegetable amaranth genotypes. The experiment was conducted in the research area of Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan under RCBD design with three replications of 50 exotic amaranth genotype. 22 different variables were investigated for the principal component and cluster analysis using different software packages in R studio. According to the results of principal component analysis the first five PCs had eigenvalues greater than one and they explained the 84.59% diversity in exotic vegetable amaranth accessions. First two principal components explained 57.31% of variation. Traits that loaded highly for first PC include moisture (-0.892), carbohydrates (0.938), energy (0.920), stomatal conductance (0.803), net photosynthesis (0.795) and dry weight (0.770). The traits which impacted the second PC highly include protein (0.692), fat (-0.571), nitrogen (0.692), calcium (0.545), phosphorus (0.908), zinc (0.960), iron (0.826) and potassium (0.872). For future breeding program the selection based on these results will be effective for crop enhancement drive in exotic vegetable amaranth genotypes. Hierarchical clustering was done and dendrogram split the 50 genotypes into 5 groups using silhouette method. The pairwise clustering revealed that intra cluster distance is smaller than inter cluster distance. The maximum inter cluster distance was observed between cluster I and II (9.88); between cluster I and III (9.47); between cluster II and IV (9.27). Clinical trial number Clinical trial number not applicable.