Variation in Morphological Characters and Storage Root Yield among Exotic Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato Clones and their Seedling Population

Abstract

Clonal evaluation was carried out with 1630 orange-fleshed sweet potato seedlings from controlled crosses of ‘Jewel’ population introduced from International Potato Centre (CIP), Lima, Peru. Morphological observations like leaf shape, emerging leaf colour, skin colour and flesh colour of storage root, weight of vine and storage root yield per plant were recorded. Wide variation was observed for all the qualitative and quantitative characters. Three types of leaf shapes were exhibited by the clones (cordate-81.65%, slightly lobed-16.69% and narrowly lobed-1.66%), while emerging leaf colour ranged between green (92.5%) to purple (7.5%). Four shades were observed in skin colour of storage roots varying from pink (35.21%), green (22.39%), purple (19.69%) to light pink colour (13.74%). The flesh colour of storage roots were observed to range from orange (37.48%), light orange (28.71%), dark orange (6.38%), cream (15.46%) to yellow (0.55%). The vine weight and root weight, being a quantitative character, varied according to the clone and environmental conditions (0.17 to 1.3 kg per plant). The vine weights of all the clones were higher in the lowland conditions than the upland conditions. Based on the evaluation of 1630 clones for tuber yield, tuber shape,  Î²-carotene content and other agronomic characters, 224 clones were selected as superior progenies for recombination and sib-mating from which promising orange-fleshed varieties of considerable value can be generated.