COMBINING ABILITY ANALYSIS FOR FRUIT YIELD AND ITS COMPONENT TRAITS IN BHENDI (ABELMOSCHUS ESCULENTUS (L.) MOENCH)

The present investigation was undertaken to evaluate six parents and fifteen hybrids through half-diallel mating system to study general and specific combining ability effects and genetic analysis for various yield and yield attributing characters. Six parents viz., Arka Anamika (P1), Thanvi 66 (P2), Villupuram Local (P3), Dhaanya (P4), Ankur 41 (P5) and Varsha Uphar (P6) were crossed in half-diallel fashion at the Plant Breeding Farm, Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Faculty of Agriculture, Annamalai University. Resulting fifteen hybrids along with their parents were evaluated for their combining ability. Observations were recorded on single plant basis. The observations were made on characters namely, days to first flowering, plant height at maturity, number of primary branches per plant, number of nodes per plant, number of fruits per plant, number of seeds per fruit, fruit length, fruit girth, single fruit weight and fruit yield per plant. In half-diallel analysis, the variance of the genotype for all the characters were highly significant indicating high genetic variability among the parents studied. The variance due to GCA was higher than the corresponding variance due to SCA for most of the characters except number of fruits per plant, fruit length and fruit girth. The combining ability variance revealed the preponderance of additive gene action for all the characters studied. The parents P1 and P6 were found as good general combiner. Based on the sca effects, the hybrid P1 x P6 considered as the best followed by crosses P2 x P4 and P3 x P4 considered as the better hybrids.