MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF GENETIC DIVERGENCE IN COTTON

The objective of this research was to study the genetic dissimilarity among sixteen cotton cultivars. Nine agronomic and fiber technology characters were evaluated. Considering these data, it was estimated the Mahalanobis’ distance (D2ij) between a pair of genotypes, the number of varieties groups found in Tocher s technique and the plot of the first two canonical variables, as well as the relative contribution of each character. Based on D2ij, the most divergent cultivars were BRS Jatoba and FM 977. The multivariate methods were congruent in their results. The ascendant order of importance of the evaluated characters were: length uniformity; reflectance; lint yield; lint strength; yellowness; micronaire; upper-half mean length; lint percentage and plant height.