干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Saccharum spontaneum L., one of the wild species in Saccharum complex has reservoir of genes for various economically important traits including resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Its contribution in the development of modern sugarcane varieties through nobilization has resulted in the first sugar revolution in the country. In India, many explorations were conducted by Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore and several valuable germplasm were collected and maintained for further utilization. The arid and semi arid zones of northwestern India are the unexplored regions of the country and collections from these zones would be valuable in terms of tolerance to abiotic stresses. An exploration was conducted in the six agro climatic zones of northwestern India in the state of Gujarat. A total of 32 collections were made and detailed information on passport data and various important descriptors were documented. These clones were planted and characterized for ten quantitative and 26 qualitative traits. The collections showed the existence of high variability for most of the traits. Clustering based on phenotypic data grouped whole collections into six clusters. Clones from high rainfall south Gujarat (Cluster II) and low rainfall western arid (Cluster III) and north Gujarat (Cluster IV) were grouped into separate clusters. This paper describes the potential uses of the S. spontaneum collected in northwestern India and further utilization in sugarcane improvement programmes.