Abstract:
Striga is major biotic constraint and a serious threat to sorghum production in areas of semi- arid
tropics. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the performance of 49 sorghum genotypes
including resistance and susceptible checks to Striga hermonthica and to investigate the
relationship among yield and Striga related traits. The experiment was conducted at Kobo
research sub-center, North Eastern Ethiopia in 2018 main cropping season using simple lattice
design. The analysis of variance revealed significance difference among the genotypes for all
traits including grain yield, days to maturity, plant height and striga count ranged from 1462-
7972 kgha-1, 112-130days, 120-285cm and 3.35-34.25striga counts, respectively. Genotypes
ETSC-14118-2-1, ETSC-14019-9-1, ETSC-14184-8-3, ETSC-14019-14-2, ETSC-14127-1-3,
ETSC-14018-1-3, ETSC-14217-10-1, host low number of Striga count whereas, ETSC-14220-1-3,
ETSC-14124-6-1, ETSC-14124-8-3, Susceptible check, ETSC-14196-1-3 and ETSC-14126-5-2
comparatively showed high Striga severity. The genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV) ranged
from 2.97% for days to maturity (DM) to 24.94% for grain yield, while phenotypic coefficient of
variation (PCV) ranged from 2.26% for DM to 33.34% for biomass (BM). GY recorded high GCV,
medium for plant height and thousand kernel weight whereas while GY, HW and BM recorded
high PCV. Heritability values were ranged from 12.4% to 99.8%. Phenotypically positively
significant traits were head weight(0.79*),head number(0.45*),panicle width(0.29*),and panicle
length(0.26)Whereas, phenotypically and genotypically negative significant (P ≤ 0.05) for DF (rp
= -0.28, rg = -0.32), DM (rp = -0.27, rg= -0.28) and Stm-2( rp = -0.36, rg = -0.61),SV(rp = -0.48, rg
= -0.73) and SSV (rp = -0.37, rg =-0.69 ), respectively. The first seven PCA explained 89.5% of
the total variation and the traits plant height (0.83), Striga severity (0.71) days to maturity (0.59),
panicle length (0.56) and days to flowering (0.54) accounted for most of the variability. Six
clusters were found and significant distances were observed among cluster IV and V, and III & IV.
Accordingly, resistance, tolerance and susceptible genotypes were identified. However, further
research is needed to test these genotypes to prove the current results.
Keywords: Cluster analysis, Correlation, Grain yield, Principal component, Striga hermonithica