Abstract

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] is a major oil seed crop having 20% oil and 38 to 43% protein which has biological value as meat and fish protein. A field experiment was conducted during rabi 2014–15 under All India Coordinated Research Project on Soybean at Seed Breeding Farm, Department of Plant Breeding & Genetics, Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidhyalaya, Jabalpur (M. P.) to study the genetic divergence in 50 soybean genotypes and observations on 13 traits were recorded. The analysis of variance indicated that significant variation was present among the different genotypes of the soybean for all the traits under study. Genetic divergence assessed using D2 statistics for characters enabled grouping of all the genotypes in 13 clusters. Among 13 clusters, cluster I was the biggest with 24 genotypes followed by cluster III with 11 genotypes and cluster IV with five genotypes. Clusters II, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII and XIII were solitary. Maximum differences among the genotypes within the same cluster (intra-cluster) were shown by cluster IV (76.21) followed by cluster III (62.03) and cluster I (60.32). Solitary clusters II, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII and XIII showed zero intra-cluster distances. Diversity among the clusters varied from 38.21 to 987.90 inter-cluster distances. Clusters IV and XIII showed maximum inter-cluster distance (987.90).