Morphological diversity of banana (Musa sp.) accessions collected from Bengkulu Province, Indonesia.

Local banana germplasm accessions of Bengkulu Province, Indonesia, were studied to elucidate their similarity based on morphological performances using multivariate techniques. Low to medium correlation coefficients were found among 13 morphological characters of bananas, indicating that those traits are independent in nature. To facilitate interpretation of the results of principal component analysis, three PCAs, explaining 44.5% of the variability of the accessions, were adopted. PCA1 is characterized by pseudostem height, leaf blade length and peduncle length PCA2 is characterized by pseudostem color, bract apex shape, number of fruits and fruit length while PCA3 is characterized by peduncle length, fruit position, fruit length and immature fruit peel color. Using the three PCAs as the basis for clustering, the accessions can be grouped into four clusters to set apart their main habitats.