Identification of morphological variation patterns of squash species from the coast and sierra of Nayarit, Mexico

Abstract

The objective of this study was to characterize the morphological variability of 14 accessions of two squash species from the coast and sierra of Nayarit, Mexico. Seven accessions of each species of Cucurbita moschata and C. argyrosperma were characterized with 19 morphological descriptors of fruit, peduncle and seed. Statistical analysis consisted of principal component analysis, classification and correlation. The first three components explained 82 % of the total variability. The dendrogram formed five groups with similar morphological characteristics at a distance of 0.09. The characters that best explained the variability were: weight, width, length and shape of the fruit, number of seeds per fruit, pulp thickness and length of the peduncle. The correlation analysis showed positive association among width and fruit weight, number of seeds per fruit and pulp thickness, fruit weight was related to the number of seeds per fruit and pulp thickness.