Morphological evaluation of common bean diversity in Bosnia and Herzegovina using the discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC) multivariate method

In order to analyze morphological characteristics of locally cultivated common bean landraces from Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), thirteen quantitative and qualitative traits of 40 P. vulgaris accessions, collected from four geographical regions (Northwest B&H, Northeast B&H, Central B&H and Sarajevo) and maintained at the Gene bank of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences in Sarajevo, were examined. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the proportion of variance retained in the first two principal components was 54.35%. The first principal component had high contributing factor loadings from seed width, seed height and seed weight, whilst the second principal component had high contributing factor loadings from the analyzed traits seed per pod and pod length. PCA plot, based on the first two principal components, displayed a high level of variability among the analyzed material. The discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC) created 3 discriminant functions (DF), whereby the first two discriminant functions accounted for 90.4% of the variance retained. Based on the retained DFs, DAPC provided group membership probabilities which showed that 70% of the accessions examined were correctly classified between the geographically defined groups. Based on the taxonomic distance, 40 common bean accessions analyzed in this study formed two major clusters, whereas two accessions Acc304 and Acc307 didn’t group in any of those. Acc360 and Acc362, as well as Acc324 and Acc371 displayed a high level of similarity and are probably the same landrace. The present diversity of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s common been landraces could be useful in future breeding programs.