Combining ability studies in brinjal

Abstract

A 10 × 10 diallel set of crosses was attempted to study the extent of heterosis in brinjal for maturity, yield and its component characters. Estimates of gca effects and per se performance indicated that parents P10 followed by P8 and P4 were good general combiner as they showed desirable gca effects for many characters including fruit yield. In general, the parents, which have the best per se performance, were also the best general combiners, indicating a positive association between the two parameters. The cross combination P1 × P4 have recorded significantly high sea effects for days to first flowering, days to 75 per cent flowering and for days to first fruit harvest, P4 × P7 for leaf area, P7 × P8 for plant height, plant spread, fruit clusters per plant and average fruit yield per plant, P3 × P6 for fruit length, P1 × P8 for fruit width, P2 × P7 for number of fruits per plant and P6 × P9 for average fruit weight indicating the importance of both additive and non-additive effects for these characters. This suggests that the crosses having high sea effects and also involved at least one good general combiner parent may be considered useful because such crosses provide transgressive type of segregants in the advanced generation more frequently than crosses with the poor combiner parents.