Agronomic variability among hybrids of tomato plant with emphasis on the multivariate analysis

Abstract

The tomato is one of the most economically, socially and nutritionally important vegetables, presenting high added value. The culture allows high profit for the producers, but it is a high risk activity due to, specially, the sensibility of some varieties to climate conditions as well as multiple plagues and diseases that attack the culture. Therefore, the search for new hybrids with more tolerance to biotic and abiotic factors is extremely important to attend to the demand of the culture’s productive chain. The objective of this work was to demonstrate the importance of multivariate and univariate techniques in evaluating the level of similarity among hybrids of the tomato plant of the salad group with the purpose of diagnosing possible groups in relation to the variables analyzed. A total of 23 hybrids of tomato from the salad group were evaluated; of those, 9 were commercial hybrids and 14 were experimental hybrids. Throughout the conduction of the experiment, the productive characters of the culture were evaluated as well as the characteristics of the fruits and the agronomic characters of the plant. For the productive characters and the characteristics of the fruits, the multiple factor analysis was performed, and the averages were compared by the Scott-Knott test. For the agronomic characters of the plant, the exploratory data analysis was used with the correspondence analysis. The commercial hybrids studied present a high degree of similarity among them, with more than 77% of the materials with strong or high similarity with the other materials. Meanwhile, for the experimental hybrids, this result is seen in only 42.86% of the materials. The experimental hybrids 3124, 3139, and 3126 present higher divergence when compared to the other materials studied. They are, therefore, recommended to increase the genetic base of the tomato plant’s breeding program.