Belete Semahegn Yared , Tesfaye Misteru

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. 31   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2016.07.0031
Received: 18 Jul., 2016    Accepted: 24 Jul., 2016    Published: 15 Aug., 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.

Safflower as a potential oil crops which can be used as an alternative to the existing widely cultivated oil crops in Ethiopia needs seed yield improvement which inturn relies on its component characters. Examining character association and their interrelationships is helpful in selecting the breeding material for improving the complex trait such as seed yield. A study was carried out during 2012 cropping season to determine the associations of characters and partition of this association into direct and indirect effects on seed yield of safflower. Correlation coefficient analysis showed that seed yield recorded significant positive association with days to flowering (0.190), plant height (0.234), number of capitula (0.172), number of seed per plant (0.834) and hundred seed weight (0.197). The highest positive direct effect was revealed by number of seed per plant (0.89) followed by hundred seed weight (0.106) as depicted by path coefficient analysis. This study showed that number of seed per plant is the most important yield component followed by seed weight. Therefore, this suggests that direct selection based on these characters would be effective for the improvement of safflower.

Accessions; Correlation coefficient; Path coefficient; Safflower; Seed yield