Diversity of Potato Varieties in Bangladesh

A study based on completely randomized design with three replications was carried out at Tuber Crops Research Centre (TCRC), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Gazipur with a view to evaluating and classifying agro-morphological traits in 12 potato varieties to enumerating the genetic diversity. Discriminant function analysis (DFA) was done to determine the set of discriminatory functions contributed to separating 12 potato varieties into four distinct clusters. Discriminant function analysis showed that, function 1 explained 78.21% and function 2 explained 21.79% of total variance. The first function was more related to leaf area (having coefficient value of 0.661) and second function was more related to minituber per plant and plant height (having coefficient value of 0.644 and 0.523, respectively). Among 4 clusters, cluster II showed the highest distance (29.79) with cluster III followed by the distance between clusters III and IV (24.70) so the varieties in these clusters were genetically diverse. Based on mean value of the six quantitative characters for each of the four clusters and the inter cluster distance the cluster III and IV might be selected for future breeding program as a better parent to get positive heterosis. Cluster III contained six varieties BARI Alu 29, BARI Alu 35, BARI Alu 36, BARI Alu 37, BARI Alu 7 (Diamant), BARI Alu 8 (Cardinal) and which were characterized by lowest plant height and average values for other characters. Cluster IV contained three potato varieties BARI Alu 41, BARI Alu 46 and BARI Alu 53 which was characterized by highest plant height and second highest leaf area.