In order to analyze morphological characteristics of locally cultivated
common bean landraces from Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), thirteen
quantitative and qualitative traits of 40 P. vulgaris accessions, collected
from four geographical regions (Northwest B&H, Northeast B&H, Central B&H and
Sarajevo) and maintained at the Gene bank of the Faculty of Agriculture and
Food Sciences in Sarajevo, were examined. Principal component analysis (PCA)
showed that the proportion of variance retained in the first two principal
components was 54.35%. The first principal component had high contributing
factor loadings from seed width, seed height and seed weight, whilst the
second principal component had high contributing factor loadings from the
analyzed traits seed per pod and pod length. PCA plot, based on the first two
principal components, displayed a high level of variability among the
analyzed material. The discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC)
created 3 discriminant functions (DF), whereby the first two discriminant
functions accounted for 90.4% of the variance retained. Based on the retained
DFs, DAPC provided group membership probabilities which showed that 70% of
the accessions examined were correctly classified between the geographically
defined groups. Based on the taxonomic distance, 40 common bean accessions
analyzed in this study formed two major clusters, whereas two accessions
Acc304 and Acc307 didn?t group in any of those. Acc360 and Acc362, as well as
Acc324 and Acc371 displayed a high level of similarity and are probably the
same landrace. The present diversity of Bosnia and Herzegovina?s common been
landraces could be useful in future breeding programs.