GENETIC VARIABILITY AND RELATIONSHIPS OF YIELD AND YIELD-RELATED TRAITS OF FINGER MILLET [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.] GENOTYPES AT MECHARA, EASTERN ETHIOPIA

Finger millet is an important cereal crop in Ethiopia; however, the production of the crop is not at its genetic potential due to a number of production challenges, such as the lack of high yielding varieties and limited genetic information. Thus, the main objectives of this study were to assess the genetic variability, heritability, genetic advance, and association among yield and yield-related traits, as well as the direct and indirect effects of yield-related traits on grain yield. Sixty-four finger millet genotypes were evaluated for seventeen traits in 2021 at Mechara using an 8 x 8 simple lattice design. The result of the analysis of variance revealed highly significant differences for the studied traits. The grain yield ranged from 1.38 t ha-1 for G51 to 4.35 ton ha-1 for G47. High GCV and PVC values were found for biomass yield, harvest index, and grain yield. Broad-sense heritability ranged from 50.12% for number of fingers per ear to 93.18% for days to heading. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance was observed for leaf number per plant, finger length, ear weight, thousand grain weight, biomass yield, and harvest index. Grain yield had a highly significant positive correlation with the number of productive tillers, thousand grain weight, biomass yield, harvest index, leaf numbers per plant, ear weight, and number of ears per plant at both genotypic and phenotypic levels. The biomass yield and harvest index had high positive direct effect on grain yield at both the genotypic and phenotypic levels. Sixty-four genotypes were analyzed using the clustering method, and they were divided into nine different clusters based on Euclidean distance. The maximum inter-cluster genetic distance (8.9) was observed between clusters III and IX, while the minimum inter-cluster distance (3.28) was found between II and V. The first six PCs explained 76.3 percent of the total variability and were accounted for at maximum variability in PC1 by ear length, ear width, and grain yield, while PC2 was explained by days to heading, days to maturity, plant height, number of ears, and harvest index. Generally, the present result showed the presence of genetic variations among genotypes for yield and yield-related traits that could be used in future breeding work.