Clustering fastigiata peanut accessions for selection of early mature types suitable for the food market.

Germplasm collections are the main raw material for breeding programs. Peanut is an important oilseed that serves to oil and food markets. The identification of early-mature genotypes and earliness adds benefits to crop production as it minimizes the costs of management and the losses of pod production due to occurrence of dry periods. In this paper, we estimate the genetic divergence in 77 peanut accessions (subsp. fastigiata), using three clustering methods, in order to identify early-mature genotypes and earliness for food market. The accessions were grown in field and phenotyped for 19 qualitative and quantitative traits. The Tocher methodology was employed for discriminating Valencia accessions. Both UPGMA and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) were used to identify and cluster genotypes. The results identified at least, two groups including high yield-earliness (fastigiata) and drought tolerance (vulgaris) accessions, promising for food market. These methodologies provided interesting combinations for further using in breeding program aiming to generate early-mature lines for food market with adaptability to semi-arid environments.