In sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) crops for further improvement, one of the breeding efforts can continue through colchicine-induced mutations. Previously, PT GMP had developed through breeding GMP3 cultivars by mutation induction using colchicine. Nevertheless, no studies have investigated how colchicine affects agronomic traits. This pertinent research complements the results of previous work, namely, observing the anatomical characteristics of stomata. The presented study sought to determine the agronomic traits of sugarcane cultivar GMP3 breeding through colchicine induction. The study perceived a descriptive analysis of the agronomic features of nine-month-old mutants of sugarcane cultivar GMP3, carried out in 2021 at the Gunung Madu Plantations, Lampung, Indonesia. The assessment compared the treatment means, with the data further analyzed through clusters and PCA analyses using MVSP software. The results revealed that 21 mutants of the sugarcane cultivar GMP3 had considerable genetic diversity, such as medium-sized leaf width, dark green leaf color, cylindrical internode shape, no dorsal plane hairs, leaf shape with branches at the edges of the leaves, medium internode length (>13 cm), and stem diameter (2.5–3.0 cm). The phenetic analysis showed the degree of relationship between the control and 21 mutants of the cultivar GMP3, with similarity indices ranging from 0.70 to 1.00, confirming the similarity of agronomic traits. The principal component analysis (PCA) indicated the relationship between the control and cultivar GMP3 mutants for qualitative traits with an eigenvalue (>0.20), revealing that 13 agronomic traits played a considerable role in cluster grouping. These findings can become a basis for future research on colchicine-mutated sugarcane.
Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.), cultivar GMP3, colchicine mutation, agronomic traits, cluster and principal component analyses
The 21 colchicine mutants of cultivar GMP3 revealed considerable diversity in agronomic traits, i.e., medium-sized leaf width, dark green leaf color, leaf shape with branches, no dorsal hairs, cylindrical segment shape, medium segment length (>13 cm), and medium-sized stem diameter (2.5–3.0 cm). The results obtained can benefit a basis for future sugarcane breeding through colchicine mutation.