Anita Babbar

Department of Plant Breeding & Genetics, Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, Jabalpur 482004(MP), India
Author    Correspondence author
Plant Gene and Trait, 2017, Vol. 8, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/pgt.2017.08.0002
Received: 30 Dec., 2016    Accepted: 06 Feb., 2017    Published: 24 Feb., 2017

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.

Babbar A., 2017, Gene action for quantiative traits in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), Plant Gene and Trait, 8(2): 8-17 (doi: 10.5376/pgt.2017.08.0002)

Five generations (P₁, P₂, F₁, F₂ and F₃) of six chickpea inter-varietal crosses, involving seven parents evaluated to know the nature of gene effects for seed yield and its related traits through generation mean analysis. In presence of epistasis, the five parameter model (Hayman, 1958) of generation mean analysis was used to detect all types of gene effects (m, d, h, i and l). Significant negative estimates of both additive (d) and additive x additive type (i) of gene action was found for days to 50% flowering, days to pod initiation, days to maturity, plant height and number of primary branches in the crosses JG 16 x ICC 96029, JG 74 x ICC 96029, JG 130 x ICC 96029, JGG 1 x ICC 96029, Narsinghpur Bold x ICC 96029 and JG130 x JG 322 had predominance of negative additive effects only for plant height, number of primary branches and number of seeds per plant. Significant positive dominance effect (h) was observed for days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, effective pods per plant, number of seeds per plant and biological yield per plant in JG 16 x ICC 96029. Dominance x dominance (l) gene effects also played significant positive role in JG 16 x ICC 96029 for almost all the characters except days to maturity, pod filling percentage and harvest index. Significant positive heterosis coupled with positive inbreeding depression was observed for days to 50% flowering, days to pod initiation, number of primary branches, effective pods per plant, number of seeds per plant and seed yield per plant in cross JG 16 x ICC 96029, for days to pod initiation and effective pods per plant, in cross JGG 1 x ICC 96029 and for number of seeds per plant in cross Narsinghpur Bold x ICC 96029. Cross JG 16 x ICC 96029 has been identified superior and can be effectively used for heterosis breeding.

Generation mean analysis; Gene action; Heterosis; Inbreeding depretion; Chickpea