ABSTRACT
The objective of this work was to evaluate the diversity between accessions of Cucurbita moschata from the Northeast of Brazil and preserved at the Universidade Federal Rural do Semi-Árido (UFERSA) in Mossoró-RN. The experiment was carried out in complete randomized blocks, with two replications and three plants per plot. The treatments consisted of 51 accessions of C. moschata Duch and a commercial cultivar of Cucurbita maximum Duch. After ripening, the fruits were harvested (one fruit per plant) and evaluated for morpho-agronomic descriptors. Univariate and multivariate variance analyzes were performed. From the dissimilarity matrices, accessions were hierarchically grouped by the UPGMA method. The relative contribution of quantitative characters to the divergence was also estimated. There was an effect of accessions (p <0.01 or p <0.05) for all characters in univariate analyzes, indicating that there is heterogeneity between the accessions evaluated. Considering the quantitative descriptors, the accessions formed eight groups and for the qualitative six groups. When considering the two sets of descriptors, the accessions were distributed in eight groups but presenting a greater distribution of accessions. The descriptors that most contributed to the discrimination of accessions were the firmness of the pulp and the length of the fruit.