Iftekhar Ahmed¹, Nazirul Islam², Quzi Maruf Ahmed³, Sajia Rahman⁴, Rezwan Molla⁴ and Sreekanth Attaluri⁵

¹Senior Scientific Officer (SSO), Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Center (BARI), Gazipur, Bangladesh
²Ex-Director General, BARI and Former Chief Scientific Officer, PGRC, BARI, Gazipur, Bangladesh
³Scientific Officer, PGRC, BARI, Gazipur, Bangladesh
⁴Senior Scientific Officer, PGRC, BARI, Gazipur, Bangladesh
⁵Senior Program Specialist (Crops), SAARC Agriculture Centre, Dhaka, Bangladesh

*Corresponding Author: Iftekhar Ahmed; Senior Scientific Officer (SSO), Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Center (BARI), Gazipur, Bangladesh.

Received: August 07, 2023; Published: September 18, 2023

Abstract

Over a period of three decades, from inception in 1987 to 2018, the Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC) of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) collected and conserved about 11081 accessions of 89 crops in its gene bank. Cucumber germplasm accounts for 241 of these accessions. The genetic diversity of 33 cucumber germplasm that included 27 newly collected and 06 genebank accessions was assessed based on morphological traits in a study conducted in the research field of PGRC, BARI, Gazipur, during March-July 2017. Genebank accessions having viability below 85% and/or seed stock below the required amount were selected for the study. Eleven qualitative and ten quantitative traits were characterized. We used the Pearson’s chi-squared (x2) test to study the distribution of traits and the Shannon Weaver Diversity Index (H´) to measure the extent of variability of each trait. The distribution of traits showed that the germplasm was dominated by an oblong fruit shape with spiny skin texture, light green fruit skin at table maturity and brown fruit skin at physiological maturity. The CV values of fruit length (35.72%), fruit weight (18.33%), number of fruit/plant (31.93%) and individual fruit weight (35.14%) represented a preponderance of high variation of the characters. High diversities were noticed for all the four fruit traits (H´= 0.75-0.87). H´ values validated the results of the x2 test and percent CV. Weaker diversity indices (0.21) were obtained in traits days to male initiation as well as pistillate flowers initiation of germplasm collected from Dhaka. Findings of this study revealed that the cucumber germplasm from Khagrachari and Jashore are potential candidates for improvement in fruit weight while that from Gazipur are marked by earliness and bearing habit.

Keywords: Cucumis sativus; Diversity Index; Morphological Traits; Coefficient of Variation; Monoecious

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Citation

Citation: Iftekhar Ahmed., et al. “Genetic Diversity of Cucumber Germplasm Collected and Conserved at the Plant Genetic Resources Centre of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute".Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 7.10 (2023): 37-47.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2023 Iftekhar Ahmed., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.