Morphological characterization of chilli genotypes

Abstract

for a given genotypes may be considered invariant. It includes basic morphological description of accessions which may enable any subsequent contamination or mixup of accessions to be identified. The extent of this description depends very much on the species in question and identifying duplicate or mislabeled accessions is much more difficult. Chillies are known as often cross pollinated but natural cross pollination percentage varies from 2 to 90% (Pickersgill, 1997) and due to this reason, it is always difficult to identify a true species in chilli. Again most of the inter-specific crosses having compatibility (Smith and Heiser, 1957) make more difficult to isolates a line from masses without any admixture. Thus a thorough description and species identification of the existing diverse germplasms is a prerequisite for better utilization of the germplasm in future breeding programme. Hence, such a research programme was undertaken to characterize the diverse assemblage of chilli.