Evaluation of sugarcane morphological descriptors using variance component analysis

Abstract

Genotypic, environmental, interaction, and error variances were studied for each of 24 qualitative and 142 quantitative morphological characters. Data were collected in 3 character sets: vegetative macromorphological, inflorescence, and epidermal. Broad-sense heritability was estimated for quantitative characters, and variance components were estimated. Non-zero significance was determined for variance components of all characters. Many characters were identified as having a large genetic component to their variation. Optimising the descriptive power of vegetative macromorphology characters requires the use of test clones to quantify the environmental effect, and a high level of sampling to reduce error variance. Less work is required for inflorescence characters, which are mostly highly heritable. Some valuable epidermal characters were identified.