GENETIC VARIABILITY AND ASSOCIATIONS OF YIELD AND YIELD RELATED TRAITS OF LENTIL (Lens culinaris Medik.) GENOTYPES AT DIRE DAWA, ETHIOPIA

Lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus) is a self-pollinated diploid (2n = 14) annual cool season legume crop that is produced throughout the world and valued as high protein food. Genetic diversity is essential for genetic improvement of crops to make selection and improvement for a given trait. The objective of the were study the genetic variation for different agronomic traits of lentil, the phenotypic and genotypic correlation coefficien0ts among these traits and the direct and indirect effects of these traits on seed yield. In the present study, 30 lentil genotypes were used for the study and evaluated for genetic variability and associations of yield and yield related traits at Dire Dawa, Tony farm, from July 6, 2017 to October 10, 2017 in a completely randomized block design (CRBD). The genotypes were obtained from Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The collected data were analyzed to determine significant varietal difference by employing analysis of variance for each trait. High significant differences among genotypes for all traits were recorded indicating the presence of genetic variability. The broad sense heritability estimates were high for all traits except for pod length and biological yield which showed moderate heritability and seed yield which showed low heritability, thus, indicating little environmental influence on the traits. Correlation analysis indicated that the values of genotypic correlation coefficients were slightly higher than their corresponding phenotypic correlation coefficients for all except for 100 seed weight, signifying that the association among various traits is of genetic cause rather than environmental effect. The path analysis revealed that days to 95% maturity (1.41633), plant height (1.01723), number of pods per plant (0.98701), number of seeds per pod (0.29773), pod length (0.07098), 100 seed weight (0.29655) and days to emergence (0.11418) contributed positive direct effects on seed yield at genotypic level; so direct selection for these traits may be given more emphasis while selecting high yielding lentil genotypes at the genotypic level whereas at phenotypic level days to 50% flowering (0.17214), plant height (2.4178), number of pods per plant (2.47851), number of seeds per pod (0.09475) and pod length (1.42147) contributed positive direct effect along with their positive significant phenotypic association with seed yield, signifying that direct selection for these traits may be desirable for yield improvement in lentil at the phenotypic level