Morphological Characterization of above Ground Characters of Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott.) Accessions from North East India

Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott), belonging to the family Araceae, is a major tuber crop grown in the tropical and sub-tropical regions. As the North Eastern states of India are regarded to be one of the primary centres of origin of taro, a considerable level of diversity is expected among the taro accessions. Therefore, the present study attempts to morphologically characterize 25 taro accessions collected from different North Eastern states of India using 27 above ground characters based on a combination of National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR)/ International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) descriptors. Based on the frequency of the phenotypic characters across the 25 accessions, the Shannon Weaver’s diversity index (H) was found to be 0.63. PCA analysis extracted three principal components representing 67.7% of the variability in the data. These observations were consistent with the box plot and biplot representations. The biplot representation showed agreement with the PCA results with leaf margin colour, leaf sheath colour and petiole colour (top 1/3rd, middle and base) contributing more to the overall variability, whereas, the range of character distributions represented in the form of box plot revealed that leaf margin colour, leaf colour (lower), petiole colour (top 1/3rd and middle) accounted for maximum variation. The dendrogram generated from hierarchical cluster analysis grouped the accessions into two broad clusters, which were further divided into two and five subclusters, respectively. It was also observed that geographical origin of the accessions did not bear any relationship with the morphological classification. In addition to supporting breeding and germplasm conservation programmes, the data can serve as a baseline for correlation with other types of markers.