Despite the benefits of garlic (Allium sativum L.) in human life, only a little amount of breeding effort has been done so far. The initial stages of a systemic breeding program include the collection and evaluation of genetic variability. As a result, understanding genetic divergence and cluster dispersion between accessions is a great way to improve future crops. This study was aimed to estimate the extent of genetic divergence across 28 Ethiopian garlic accessions using 11 agromorphological traits to identify parent lines for hybridization programs. The experiment was set up with a randomized complete block design with three replicates in Dorze, southern Ethiopia, during the 2017 main harvest season. The cluster analysis revealed the existence of four divergent groups, with the greatest distance among them being between Groups I and IV (D 2 = 4.15), and the shortest distance being between Groups I and II (D 2 = 2.93). To obtain accessions with high grain yield and early maturing, cross from Clusters I and IV and from III and IV were obtained. Parent material should be produced among clusters rather than within clusters for future hybridization breeding efforts.
INTRODUCTIONGarlic (Allium sativum L.) is a plant that originates from Central Asia and is grown worldwide for culinary, medicinal, and religious purposes (Ayalew, 2015;Dangi et al., 2018).Because of the presence of sulfur compounds, biological agents (allicin), and other derivatives, garlic has the potential to boost the immune system for the treatment of human diseases (Jabbes et al., 2012;Wang et al., 2014). It also has the characteristic of a pungent odor and is rich in sugar, protein, fat, calcium, potassium, phosphorous, iodine fiber, and sili-Abbreviations: PCA, principal components analysis.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.