Phenotypic Evaluation of Heritability, Agro-Morphological and Yield Characters of Sixteen Amaranthus Linn. Genotypes

The field experiment was conducted to evaluate the heritability, genetic variance, agro-morphological and yield characters of Sixteen Amaranthus genotypes. The seeds of the sixteen (16) genotypes of Amaranthus evaluated in this study were; NG/AA/MAY/09/027, NG/AA/03/11/010, NG/AO/11/08/042, NG/AO/11/08/039, NG/SA/DEC/07/0423, NG/SA/DEC/07/0412, NGB01667, NGB01601, NGB01283, NGB01271, NGB01276, NGB01259, NGB01644, NGB01234, NGB01613 and NGB01662. The results showed that there were variability performances in growth and yield characters of Amaranthus genotypes. NG/AA/MAY/09/027 and NG/AO/11/08/039 had the best growth characters while NG/AO/11/08/042 had best yield performance compared to other genotypes. The stem length recorded the best heritability estimate of 95.5% while weight of dry leaf, weight of fresh and dry inflorescent had least (47.7%). The plant height had a positive significant correlation with number of leaf (r = 0.53), leaf width (r = 0.57), number of branches (r = 0.56) but a strong positive correlation with stem length (r = 0.97), stem girth (r = 0.75), number of inflorescent (r = 0.68), inflorescent length (0.64) and inflorescent width (r = 0.72). Prin. 1 accounted for the highest variation in growth and yield characters with proportion of 0.3376 and eigen value of 4.7269, while Prin. 14 was the least with proportion of 0.0003 and eigen value of 0.0038. Therefore, there could be genetic improvement of NG/AA/MAY/09/027 and NG/AO/11/08/039 genotypes for further improvement of Amaranthus.