Yared Semahegn , Misteru Tesfaye

Holetta Research Center, Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, P.O.Box 2003, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2016, Vol. 7, No. 22   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2016.07.0022
Received: 16 Mar., 2016    Accepted: 30 Apr., 2016    Published: 07 Jun., 2016

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Yared S., and Misteru T., 2016, Genetic Variability and Correlation Analysis of Ethiopian Linseed (Linum usitatissimum L.) Accessions, Molecular Plant Breeding, 7(22): 1-5 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2016.07.0022)

This study was executed in 2012/13 cropping season to determine variation of 202 accessions and correlation coefficients of some agronomic characters. The experiment was carried using augmented design with no replication. Accessions showed variation for days to flowering ranged between 77 and 135 days with a mean value of 99.65 and coefficient of variation 13%. Accessions such as acce # 10 077, 10 078, 1 0079, 10 084, 10 086, 10 087, 13 578, 13 598, 13 620 and 13 649 showed earliness, which ranged from 170-172 days to mature, while accessions such as acce # 212 854, 212 857, 215 716, 10 103, 10 104, and 10 105 took 180-182 days to mature. A range of 14.0 to 38.8 was recorded for number of capsule per plant with a mean value of 23.12 and coefficient of variation 19%. Accessions such as acce # 230 822, 10 070, 10 105, 10 086, 10 069, 10 079, 10 052 and 219 969 had number of capsule ranged from 32 -41. A significant amount of variation was also observed for seed yield, which was between 104 kg/ha and 1982 kg/ha with a mean value of 984.37 kg/ha and coefficient of variation 39%. Accessions such as acce # 10 067, 10 061, 10 084, 10 069, 13 755, 10 070, 10 054, 10 068, 241 826, 10 064 and 10 150 were high yielding, which varied between 1 592 kg/ha and 1 990 kg/ha. Correlation coefficient analysis indicated that seed yield had significant positive association with plant height (0.215 9), number of secondary branches (0.204 8), and number of capsule (0.384 6), while it recorded significant negative correlation with days to maturity (-0.142 6) and number of primary branches (-0.298 2). This study has also suggested that number of capsule per plant was found to be the most important yield component for the improvement of seed yield of linseed.

Accessions; Correlation coefficients; Linseed; Variation; Yield; Yield component