Parental Diversity

A series of experiments were conducted to assess the genetic diversity, heterosis, combining ability and genotype-environment interaction and also to identify water logging tolerant maize hybrids at Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Gazipur along with other two regional stations of BARI (Rahmatpur, Barisal and Burirhat, Rangpur) during November 2011 to August 2014. Genetic diversity of sixty four exotic inbred lines of maize were studied for yield and yield components, maturity and growth parameters, and stress related characters at BARI, Gazipur. Principal component analysis revealed that the first principal axis largely accounted for the variation among the genotypes which alone contributed 44.13% of the variations followed by the 2nd axis (30.75%) while the first six eigen values for the principal component axis of genotype accounted for 97.55% of the total variation among 10 characters. The sixty four inbreds were grouped into six clusters using the non-hierarchical clustering method where the maximum ( 1 8 ) a n d minimum ( 4 ) number of inbreds were comprised into cluster III and V, respectively.