Phenotypic characterization of periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus L. G. Don.) for the selection of promising materials for breeding programs

Catharanthus roseus germplasm in India is predominantly inbred, implying the importance of accessing and detecting morphological variability in order to find acceptable genotypes with desired characteristics for novel variety generation and pharmacological evaluation. Seventeen morphological features were used to characterise the 25 C. roseus accessions. The current study found significant variance in qualitative and quantitative morphological features, despite 14 variables showing significant dissimilarity among accessions. The majority of the target features differed significantly (p < 0.05) between the analysed accessions. The PCA grouping pattern revealed the characteristics as the five main components, which could explain the total 74.06% variation. The dendrogram created from the recorded attributes revealed three distinct clusters as well as significant variability across the accessions investigated. The best-performing accession among twenty-five accessions collected with respect to morphology was Cr00PFRE and Cr00LPFLPE, which had maximum leaf size and plant height, respectively. The findings of this work show that the accessions analysed can be considered a representative gene pool of C. roseus.