摘要：Morphometric studies of twelve accessions of Sesamumindicum L. were carried out in order to find out characters which may be used for the delimitation of the accessions in Nigeria. The drastic increase for nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural demands of the important crop requires an understanding of the morphological features with the view of mapping out breeding strategies. The quantitative and qualitative characters used include growth type, leaf shape, leaf type, leaf margin, leaf arrangement, leaf surface, form of stipule, colour of dot at stipule, leaf orientation, leaf colour, leaf apex, leaf base, stem type, stem texture, stem colour, calyx colour, corolla colour, type of cymose inflorescence, flower aestivation, flower shape, flower colour, fixation of anther, fruit type, fruit shape, fruit size, fruit colour (immature, mature and dry colour), fruit end shape, fruit lobes and fruit surface. Quantitative morphological characters include plant height, leaf length, leaf breadth, petiole length, pod length, pod breadth pod size, number of primary branches per plant, number of leaves per plant and number of pod per plant. Numerical analysis of these character data using cluster analysis – average linkage, single linkage, complete linkage and centroid method delimit the twelve accessions into five cluster groups which conform to the results of the morphological analysis. The result of these morphological variability analyses may set the foundation to detect promising accessions for mapping out future breeding schemes of this multi-purpose crop
