Soleh Akram¹ , B.M. Nahid  Hussain¹ , Md. Abdullah Al  Bari¹ , David J.  Burritt² , Mohammad Anwar Hossain¹

1 Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh-2202, Bangladesh
2 Department of Botany, University of Otago, New Zealand
Author    Correspondence author
Plant Gene and Trait, 2016, Vol. 7, No. 13   
Received: 18 Sep., 2016    Accepted: 07 Nov., 2016    Published: 20 Nov., 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.

An experiment was conducted using a randomized complete block design to estimate genetic variability, and to analyse correlation and path coefficient between yield and its components of eleven soybean genotypes. Analysis of variance for yield and yield contributing traits showed significant (p<0.01) variation among the genotypes. Results of genetic analyses showed a higher phenotypic coefficient of variation compared to their corresponding genotypic coefficient of variation for all the traits measured, which indicates that the traits were influenced by environment to some extent. High heritability values along with high genetic advance and genetic advance as percentage of mean were found for plant height, yield/plant, number of pods/plant and number of seeds/plant, indicated the scope of improvement for these characters. Yield/plant showed a significant positive correlation with the number of branches/plant (0.851), number of pods/plant (0.988), number of seeds/plant (0.988) and 100-seed weight (0.634) whereas it showed a non-significant positive correlation with pod length. In contrast, yield/plant showed a negative correlation with days to first flowering, days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height and number of seeds/pod. Path coefficient analysis showed that the seeds/plant had the highest (2.848) positive direct effect on yield/plant, followed by pods/plant, days to first flowering, number of branches/plant, 100-seed weight, plant height, and pod length. So, the number of pods/plant and seeds/plant could be considered as important selection criteria for yield improvement in soybean.

Genetic Variability; Heritability; Genetic Advance; Correlation; Path coefficient; Yield; Soybean