Morphological Variations among Selfed Lines of the First Generation of Zingiber mioga Roscoe

Abstract

One hundred-six selfed lines of the first generation of Zingiber mioga Roscoe were raised during 1988 to 1989. In this study, 29 selfed lines with different numbers of chromosomes (2 n=4960) were randomly selected from them together with a parental line (2 n = 55) and used for the experiment. To evaluate the variations among the 29 lines, 11 morphological characters of aerial parts, rhizomes, and the number of spikes per plant were analyzed by principal component analysis. The analysis showed that most of the selfed lines were smaller than the parental line. Some selfed lines however had more tillers, leaf blades, spikes, and wider leaf blades, and/or thicker main pseudostems than the parental line. The parental line and 20 selfed lines that produced more than four spikes per line were used for an analysis of the morphological variations of spikes. The length, width, and weight of spikes were analyzed by principal component analysis and cluster analysis. Spikes of the selfed lines were classified into six groups in the two analyses. On the basis of the spike types classified, three selfed lines were eventually selected from four selfed lines which had more spikes per plant than the parental line. The results show that lines of Z. mioga can be improved by selecting desirable genotypes through seed propagation.