Genetic diversity among tomato’s subsamples for prebreeding

Abstract

The aim of this work was to evaluate 56 Solanum lycopersicon subsamples through agronomic descriptors, and to quantify their genetic diversity. Two essays were conducted with three replications in a randomized block design. There was significant variability among subsamples for all phenotypic descriptors. Four distinct groups were formed by the Tocher procedure, and there was a projection of distances in the plan. The efficiency of the group was denoted by the low apparent error rate of discriminant functions, 1.66%. The phenotypic traits that contributed most to the dissimilarity were: fruit length, width of the central axis, total commercial fruit number, commercial fruit weight and total fruit number. The following subsamples were considered promising for use in future breeding programs: BGH 7222, BGH 7267 and BGH 887, group 3, BGH 2143, BGH 6866 and BGH 7218, group 1 and the subsamples BGH 6889 and BGH 7213, group 2.