Results
The minimum, maximum, mean values, standard deviations (SD) and
coefficients of variation (CV) in twenty six characteristics are shown in Table
1. The results revealed a large variation among accessions in some traits. For
leaf character, petiole length was the highest variation as depicted by CV
values. In terms of staminate and pistillate flowers, petal width had more
variation than petal length, and sessile bract length was more diverse than its
width. For most flower traits, male flower had higher variation than female
flower. In view of fruit character, all characteristics were highly diverse except
days to anthesis. For seed size, seed thickness had more variation than seed
width and length. In consideration of all traits, fruit weight and seeds per fruit
were clearly high in diversity as they had high CV values of 40.82 and 40.87
per cent, respectively.
PCA of fifteen traits associated with seventy four accessions of Thai bitter
melon landrace is shown in Table 2. The fifteen traits were reduced to seven
variables (components), which responded 69.82 % of the total variation. The
principal component 1 (PC1) had the largest Eigen-value (1.950) and accounted
for the greatest amount of variance in the original data. Characters with higher
coefficients on the PCs should be considered more important, thus higher eigen
vectors are shown in bold in Table 2. Fruit length and seeds per fruit had higher