Caracterización morfológica y agronómica de doscientos cuarenta ecotipos de quinua (Chenopodium quinoa Will.) de panoja roja, tipo Chimborazo.

Abstract

The following research proposes to characterize morphologically and agronomically two hundred and forty ecotypes of quinoa (Chenopodium quinua Will.) of red panicle, Chimborazo type; a descriptive statistic and a multivariate analysis were used, by the means of the principal component method and the cluster analysis. The agronomic and morphological characteristics were evaluated, then the ecotypes were grouped by similarities using the number of the main components that explain more than 70% of the variation; for the elaboration of the massal groups, the Ward method and the Euclidean squared distance were used, determining the shortest distances between the means of each of the variables, in order to obtain groups with a high homogeneity. It is concluded that there was a wide variability in the morphological variables, the stem shape being the only uniform variable in the ecotypes studied; and in the agronomic variables, only the days of harvesting show a coefficient of variation less than 10%, which indicates little variability. Each of the elaborated massal groups has outstanding characteristics, the groups 1 and 2 being the latest and with good resistance to mildew, the group 3 presents uniformity in the color of the plant, the groups 4 and 6 are the ones with better yield and greater susceptibility to mildew and the group 5 the one with quinoa called sweets because of their low saponin content.