Morphological Variability of Aerial Vegetative Characters among 20 Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus Willd.) Collections from Kerala, India

Abstract

Asparagus racemosus Willd. (Shatavari) is an important medicinal plant which is well known for its  galactagogue property due to the presence of phytoestrogen in tuber. Observations on 18 aerial  vegetative quantitative and 7 qualitative traits were scored at full foliage stage of all the 20 accessions.  Analysis of variance revealed significant (p<0.05) morphological variations in all the quantitative  vegetative parameters recorded.The highest coefficient of variations were accounted for length of  cladode clusters, plant height, length of fresh spear and number of cladodes per whorl that signify the  high degree of variability with regard to these traits. The highest genotypic and phenotypic coefficients of variation were also exhibited by the same characters with above 95% heritability. All the accessions  studied for qualitative characters showed similarity only in cladode shape, cladode arrangement and stem shape. Principal Component Analysis showed 99.76% of total variance on the first four Principal Components. Significant characters accounted for variability were stem color, length of cladode clusters, plant height, stem diameter and number of cladodes per whorl respectively. The Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Average dendrogram with 25 variables divided the accessions into two principal clusters between Euclidean distances of 0.3-1.6. The results of Principal Component Analysis and Principal Co-ordinate Analysis are concurring to the cluster analysis. High degree of phenotypic and genotypic variations indicating that genotypic component of variation was the major contributor  to the total variation and the environment has little effect on the observed phenotypic variations of the traits.