ESTIMATES OF HERITABILITY, HETEROSIS AND INBREEDING DEPRESSION FOR YIELD AND QUALITY TRAITS IN MAIZE
PREETI SHARMA, M. S. PUNIA AND M. C. KAMBOJ
Department of Genetics & Plant Breeding
CCS Haryana Agricultural University,
Hisar-125 004 (Haryana), India
(e-mail : sharmapreeti.genetics@gmail.com)
(Received : 05 September 2015; Accepted : 28 December 2015)
SUMMARY
The experiment was conducted to evaluate the six single cross hybrids and their F2 populations developed from crossing and selfing between five inbred lines of maize were evaluated at experimental area of CCS Haryana Agricultural University Regional research Station, Uchani, Karnal during 2013-14 to estimate heritability, genetic advance, heterosis and inbreeding depression for 15 quantitative traits. Highly significant heterosis over better parents was found for all the characters, correlated that with inbreeding depression for all traits. The highly significant positive heterosis to better parent was observed for most studied traits, indicating that dominance direction was towards the best parent except for days to 50 per cent taselling, days to 50 per cent silking and days to maturity in all the six crosses which showed highly significant negative heterosis over better parent indicating that dominance direction was towards the lower/inferior parent. Selfing caused a significant decrease in the measurements of all the characters taken in all selfed (F2) populations, except for days to tasseling, days to silking and days to maturity which has showed an increase in magnitude. Narrow sense heritability and genetic advance were low in most of the cases due to the prevalence of non-additive gene action in controlling the genetic variation of the most of the studied traits. The inbred lines and hybrids revealed good potential for yield and quality traits and can be used as parents for crosses between improved populations or inbred lines developed from them.
Key words:Heterosis, hybrids, QPM, inbred, gene action, heritability