Diversity analyses of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) through agro-morphological traits

The limited genetic resource of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is one of the most critical issue impeding its improvement and production. Collection and characterization of chickpea for agronomic traits is prerequisite to build a successful breeding programme through expanding chickpea's genepool to fulfil the needs of farmers and breeders, such as grain size and yield which supply food to a world rising population. To reach such an objective, numerous collection missions were carried out in Algeria, covering the northern agro-ecological environments, this allows us to gather 56 national and international genotypes that report a phenotypic variability and may provide a valuable diversity of useful features. Characterization experiments of 19 agro-morphological traits were set up at the Technical Institute of Field Crops over two successive seasons 2020 and 2021. All traits were statistically significant and the cluster analysis classified the genotypes into three major group, where local and improved accessions revealed an interesting outcome in terms of seed yield and resistance to Ascochyta blight. In general, the current study's findings clearly demonstrated that plant and seed morphological characteristics could be used to distinguish and identify chickpea genotypes. More often, it might participate as a source of variation in breeding programmes to meet the desirable improvement targets.