Heterosis and combining ability for shelf-life, whole fruit firmness and related traits in tomato

Abstract

Shelf-life is a major quality attribute, which is dependent upon fruit firmness. The line x tester analysis for shelflife and related traits revealed that line FT-5, 102, Magna and Cal-ace were good general combiners for fruit firmness, number of locules per fruit, pericarp thickness and shelf-life. Among testers, V-16 was good general combiner for all the characters except number of locules per fruit. The ratio of gca/sca variances observed less than unity for all the characters, depicting the predominance of non additive genetic variance. Amongst crosses, H-711492 × 101, 260 × V-16 exhibited the maximum heterosis over better parent for whole fruit firmness, pericarp thickness, respectively. Whereas, cross combination FT-5 × V-16 recorded highest significant heterobeltiosis and sca estimates for shelf-life. Hence, this cross combination can be commercially utilized for the development of hybrids having longer shelf-life.