Genetic Variation of Oriental Tobaccos Using Multivariate Analysis

Tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum) is one of the valuable agricultural and industrial crops that there is little information about its variation. For studying genetic variation on the basis of morphological characteristics, a number of 100 exotic and endemic oriental tobacco genotypes were obtained from the germplasm collection of the Urmia Tobacco Research Center, Urmia, Iran, using simple lattice design with 2 replications. Eight traits include: stem height and diameter, leaf number per plot, leaf length and width, fresh and dry leaf weight and day to 50% flowering were examined. Principal component analysis could reduce the studied morphological traits to 5 components having 96% accumulative variance. In the first component, all traits (except stem height) showed positive significant correlations with. Cluster analysis using UPGMA method distinguished genotypes in 4 different groups. Maximum distance was between groups 1 and 4. Mean comparison revealed that genotypes (Trimph and Ohdaruma) belong to group 4 had the maximum value of most examined traits, therefore, they could be utilized as parents of crosses in breeding programs.