Heterosis and combining ability studies in bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.]
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Date
2018
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CCSHAU
Abstract
Bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl.] also called white flower gourd or calabash gourd belongs to the family Cucurbitaceae. Bottle gourd is monoecious, annual vine and the flowers are white, solitary, showy and open at later part of the day. The fruits are variable in shape and size and are highly nutritive. The production of hybrids in bottle gourd having large number of seeds per fruit is commercially viable and hence, facilitates its hybrid seed production. Exploitation of hybrid vigour in bottle gourd could increase the yield. Although, bottle gourd has a wide range of variability, very little attention has been given for its genetic improvement. The study entitled “Heterosis and combining ability studies in bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Molina.) Standl.]” was carried out to assess the breeding value of parents by combining ability analysis using half diallel method and also to understand the usefulness of heterosis breeding. The present investigation was conducted at Vegetable Research farm of CCS HAU, Hisar during Spring-Summer and Rainy season of 2017. Six diverse parents were crossed in a half diallel fashion (excluding reciprocals) to generate fifteen F1 hybrids and were evaluated against two standard check hybrids (HBGH-35 and Pusa Hybrid-3). The observations were recorded on 23 different characters in bottle gourd.
The ANOVA exhibited significant genotypic differences, showing considerable genetic variability among different genotypes. ANOVA for combining ability showed that the mean sum of squares due to general combining ability as well as specific combining ability were also highly significant for all the traits. The specific combining ability (sca) variances were greater than general combining ability (gca) variances and the ratio of gca/sca variances did not exceed unity, indicating the predominance of non-additive gene action for all traits. On the basis of mean performance and gca effects, the parents Punjab Komal followed by Pusa Naveen and Punjab Long were the best general combiners for both earliness and yield attributes. The extent of standard heterosis for fruit yield per hectare ranged from 0.53% to 125.58% over the check HBGH-35 while, that over Pusa Hybrid-3 ranged from 7.68% to 141.63%. However, based on the mean performance, standard heterosis and sca effects, the hybrids from the crosses Pusa Naveen×Punjab Komal followed by KBG-16×Pusa Samridhi and Pusa Samridhi×Punjab Komal were considered best in terms of number of fruits per vine, average weight of fruit (g), fruit yield per vine (kg) and fruit yield per hectare (q). These crosses were promising with respect to yield and its contributibg traits and thus, could be exploited for further effective selection and heterosis breeding to augment the yield potential of bottle gourd.
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