In order to evaluate the genetic divergence among soybean cultivars, an assay was carried out at Formoso do Araguaia, TO, Brazil, in off-season of 2007, in irrigated lowland conditions. The experimental design were randomized blocks with 12 treatments and three replications. Genetic divergence was evaluated by multivariate procedures: Mahalanobis distance, Tocher clustering method's and nearest neighbor method. It was observed the formation of two distinct groups by the dendrogram of genetic dissimilarity, which were identical to those groups formed by Tocher's method. The Tocher optimization method and the nearest neighbor agreed among themselves. The traits number of days to maturity, plant height and weight of 100 seed were the ones that most contributed for genetic dissimilarity. The presence of genetic variability allowed the identification of dissimilar cultivars with high average for the evaluated traits. The hybridations 'DOKO' x 'CONQUEST' and 'DOKO' x 'FT-2000' are promising to obtain segregating populations with high variability
Glycine max; genetic variability; hybrid combination
