Morphological variations of superior sugarcane cultivars (Saccharum officinarum) from Lampung, Indonesia

Abstract

Abstract. Windiyani IP, Mahfut, Purnomo, Daryono BS. 2022. Morphological variations of superior sugarcane cultivars (Saccharum officinarum) from Lampung, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 23: 4110-4117. Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is the main crop for producing sugar and for various industries. The need for sugar is continuously increasing as the population grows and the diverse demands of industrial needs. One of the efforts to increase sugar production is by developing high-yielding sugarcane varieties. In doing so, performing morphological characterization is necessary so that superior sugarcane cultivars can be identified. This study aimed to determine the morphological variations and phenetic relationships of the crosses of sugarcane cultivars of the collections of PT. Gunung Madu Plantation in Lampung, Indonesia. Morphological observation of 15 sugarcane cultivars was carried out on 37 characters covering leaves, leaf midrib, internodes, stems, eyes, and agronomical aspects. The dendrogram was built using the UPGMA cluster using the Gower’s General Similarity Coefficient algorithm, while the PCA analysis was performed using the Euclidean Distance algorithm using MVSP v.3.1 software. The results of the study showed that there were fairly high morphological variations among the sugarcane cultivars observed. The results showed the superior sugarcane cultivars of PT. GMP collections (i.e., GMP 1, GMP 2, GMP 3, GMP 4, GMP 5, GMP 6, and GMP 7) were not in one cluster due to differences between each parent. The principal component analysis of 37 characters showed that the total variation on axis I contributed 27.62% to the variation with an eigenvalue of 0.25, while axis II was 17.9% with an eigenvalue of 0.16. The information about morphological variations in this study suggests that morphological characters as taxonomic evidence are very good for identifying and analyzing local sugarcane cultivar variations and knowing the closeness of their kinship relationships.