Capsicum (Solanaceae), comprising of sweet and hot chilli pepper, is a globally known spice crop. This genus is well known for its huge genetic diversity at intra- and inter-species level. Diversity among Akabarechilli landraces, a unique Capsicum from Nepal, has not been studied so far. The present study characterized thirty accessions of Akabarechilli using 26 qualitative and 21 quantitative agro-morphological markers at the experimental plots of National Genebank, Khumaltar, Nepal during the summer season of 2018/019. Using principal component analysis, the first- principal components with eigen-values more than 1 contributed 25% of the variability among accessions for quantitative traits, whereas the first principal components with eigen-values more than 1 contributed 22.2% of the variability among accessions for qualitative traits. These findings suggested a wide range of morphological variations among the tested accessions. Based on qualitative and quantitative traits, 30 accessions were grouped into 6 distinct clusters by Euclidian distance and average method. Accessions CO-11048 and CO-11050 under cluster-III were round shape fruit type and accessions CO-11044, CO- 11046 andCO-11047 under cluster-I were high fruiting with longer fruitbearing period and could be utilized for breeding purpose as these are the traits preferred by consumers or processors in Nepalese market. SAARC J. Agric., 19(2): 37-55 (2021)

A research was carried out at the field of National Agriculture Genetic Resources Centre (NAGRC), Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Nepal in 2019 with the objective of phenotypic characterization and genetic diversity assessment of thirty-seven local garlic landraces. The phenotypic diversity was assessed based on fifteen qualitative and nine quantitative characters by sing non replicated rod row design following the descriptors developed by IPGRI, 2001. Descriptive statistics were calculated by using MS Excel 2016 and UPGMA clustering and PCA was done with MINITAB-17. The diversity index (H’) and coefficient of variation for different traits ranged from 0.54-0.96 and 16.89-87.85, respectively. Four clusters identified and CO 10307, CO 10482 and CO 10615 of fourth clusters were superior in terms of quantitative characters. Five principal components contributed95.2% of the cumulative variance. This result will be helpful for breeder and researchers to comprehensively understand the agro-morphological characters as well as diversity of the Nepalese garlic collection.

This article describes the agrobiodiversity fair aided exploration and collection expedition of native plant genetic resources in southern Lalitpur, jointly organized by the National Agriculture Genetic Resources Centre (NAGRC) and Group of Helping Hands (SAHAS) Nepal. In-district one-day agrobiodiversity fairs were organized in February and December month of 2019, altogether two times, and these agrobiodiversity fairs were used as a tool to explore plant genetic resources found in Bagmati and Mahankal Rural Municipalities of Lalitpur district. To collect these explored genetic resources during agrobiodiversity fairs, the joint field expedition, key informant survey, diversity rich farmers discussion was used as a collection tool. The present study explored, inventoried, collected and conserved 148 accessions of 44 crop species, the highest number (18 accessions) was of chayote followed by 10 accessions each of soybean, cowpea and maize and 9 accessions of common bean. Collections are generally new and unique. Many landraces, mostly from rice (13 landraces) were identified as extinct from the surveyed areas and few are under extinction mainly due to attraction of farmers to new high yielding varieties. The collected species with orthodox seeds were tested for germination ability and those that passed a minimum of 85% germination, were preserved in seedbank of NAGRC. NAGRC plans to characterize these accessions in the coming seasons depending upon the season of crop growing. The current expedition collected eight species for which mode of propagation is vegetative or those for which seed storage behavior falls under intermediate mode. NAGRC has been started expanding field genebank coverage using these accessions.

Due to the presence of valuable genes that contribute to a variety of functional traits, landraces kept in Genebank can be extremely important in wheat breeding. A study was conducted based on agro-morphological traits of Nepalese bread wheat landraces to explore genetic diversity among them. Using a replicated rod row design, 200 landraces were evaluated during the winter season of 2018 and 2019 at Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Nepal. The degree of variations among landraces was determined using univariate and multivariate statistical tools. The Shannon-Weaver diversity index (H’) showed a wide range of variations among the studied landraces, ranging from 0.55 to 0.91 in quantitative traits and 0.63 to 0.85 in qualitative traits.Principal component (PC) analysis with an eigenvalue greater than 1 reveals that 68% of the variability for quantitative traits is contributed by the first five principal components whereas 67% of the variability of qualitative traits is governed by the first four principal components. UPGMA (Unweighted pair-groups methods through arithmetic average) clustered 202 landraces into five groups according to quantitative charterers.Identified advantageous adaptive traits through the analysis of variability within the accessions, will be used by breeders for crosses in the breeding or used directly by farmers.

Plant genetic resources are raw materials and their use in breeding is one of the most sustainable ways to conserve agro-biodiversity. Field research was conducted at National Agriculture Genetic Resources Centre (NAGRC) during 2018 & 2019 with the objective of agro-morphological characterization and diversity assessment of rice landraces. Forty-two landraces collected from 21 districts of Nepal were characterized and evaluated by using non replicated row design. The phenotypic diversity was assessed based on fourteen qualitative and thirteen quantitative characters following the descriptors developed by Bioversity International, IRRI and WARDA. Basic statistics were calculated by using Excel 2016 and UPGMA clustering and PCA was done with MINITAB-17. The diversity index (H') and coefficient of variation for different traits ranged from 0.16-0.96 and 8.00-47.77 respectively. Clustering grouped the landraces into four clusters with minimum similarity level of 46.33%. Landraces of cluster three i.e. NGRC01917, NGRC03034, NGRC03395, NGRC03057, NGRC03163 are found to be superior in terms of maturity days and yield. PCA partitioned the total variation into three principal components contributing 75.5% of the cumulative variance. Thus, the present study is the preliminary picture for characterization and diversity analysis in Nepalese rice landraces that can be used by the breeder in rice improvement program.