Studies on genetic divergence in pumpkin

Twenty five cultivars of Pumpkin are evaluated systematically during kharif season of 2013–14. Analysis of variance studies indicates significant differences among all the genotypes for all the characters under study. Majority of the characters like fruit diameter, seed cavity length, flesh thickness, placenta weight exhibit moderate PCV, GCV values and fruit weight exhibits higher GCV and PCV values. All the characters exhibited high broad sense heritability. High heritability coupled with high GCA for the characters fruit weight, fruit diameter, seed cavity length suggesting that they can be improved through direct selection due to predominant additive variation. Genetic diversity worked out using Mahalanobis D² statistics. Based on D²analysis, the genotypes were grouped into 5 different clusters, where the cluster V possessed higher number (8) of genotypes followed by the cluster I (5) cluster IV (5), III (3), II(2) and VI (2). The maximum inter-cluster distance was observed between the clusters III, VI and cluster II, III that of minimum in between the Clusters V and Cluster VI.