Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the most popular and consumed vegetable crops across the world due to its higher nutritional content, taste, and color. An experiment was carried out to determine the existing variability, heritability, and association among the yield and yield contributing traits of eleven genotypes including seven exotic and four local genotypes. Analysis of variance revealed the existence of significant differences among the genotypes for most of the characters except leaf area. Mean comparison showed that exotic cultivars G1 (SL 020) displayed early flowering and fruit setting and G11 (BARI Tomato 11) displayed higher number of clusters, flowers and fruits with smaller fruit size and yield. Estimation of genetic parameters showed higher phenotypic of coefficient of variation (PCV) than genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV) for most of the yield related traits. However, slight differences between PCV and GCV were found for number of secondary branches (31.70, 30.01), days to first flowering (14.99, 13.97), days to 50% flowering (18.68, 16.11), number of fruits per plant (83.57, 79.41), single fruit weight (47.29, 44.48), and fruit diameter (28.73, 27.61) which suggest the scope of effective selection. The number of fruits per plant and single fruit weight exhibited the highest heritability and genetic advance. Pearson correlation analysis revealed the significant and positive correlation between yield per plant with leaf area and fruit length. The principal component analysis revealed that number of fruits per plant, flowers per cluster, and fruits per cluster exhibited the most vital traits contributing to the variations among the genotypes. Hierarchical clustering showed that local and exotic tomato cultivars separated into different clusters. Higher inter cluster distance showed the scope that crossing among these genotypes could provide maximum heritability and genetic gain. These findings suggested that exotic cultivars could be included for the breeding program to develop the high yielding tomato variety.
Key words: Tomato, Variability, Correlation, PCA, Heritability
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