Twenty-five local and exotic pea cultivars and three F1 hybrids were used in this study to evaluate their performance and their phylogenetic relationships based on both the polymorphism of esterase molecular forms differentially expressed in root, stem, leaf and seed tissues and the multivariate analysis of eight developmental, yield and quality characters. This study was carried out, in El-Kassasein Horticultural Research Station during the winter seasons of 2004/2005, 2005/2006 and 2006/2007.
Least significant differences, showed that almost all pea cultivars and hybrids had considerable variation for all the eight characters where they showed a wide range of mean values for all of these characters. F1 (P6xP13) had the highest mean values for four out of the eight characters. It had an average of 241.3 gm for pods weight per plant and an average of 92.3 for number of pods per plant.
The isoesterase polymorphism showed clearly a distinguished differential display of esterase molecular forms over the four tissues during the ontogeny of the pea plant. A total of 9, 9, 15 and 16 esterase molecular forms were, respectively, obtained from root, stem, leaf and seed tissues over the twenty-eight pea cultivars and hybrids.
Dendrogram constructed based on the transformed mean values of eight polygenic traits grouped the twenty-eight pea populations on four separate clusters. The three F1 hybrids occupied a unique cluster with the hightest cluster mean values for five out of the eight characters especially those for pods weight, number of pods per plant and yield per feddan. This suggested that these three hybrids could be considered a promising base population for a successful selection program for improving pea yield.
The results demonstrated the higher discriminatory power and clustering based on multivariate analysis of eight developmental, yield and quality polygenic traits than that based on the differential expression of esterase isozymes in four tissues. Both dendrograms showed no parallelism between the two clustering systems.