Genetic studies in cowpea

Abstract

Geneticstudies were undertaken with 202 varieties of cowpea (Vigna ungulculata L.) maintained in the germplasm collection of the Division of Agricultural Botany, College of Horticulture, Vellanikkara. The studies conducted during the two khariff seasons of 1977-78 and 1978-79 were mainly directed towards estimation of the variability available in the collection, working out of the heritable components of the variability, identification of promising donor varieties for important characters and grouping the varieties into clusters according to the estimated genetic distances following the Mahalanobis D2-statistic.