Ramesh, SSURESH2017-10-042017-10-042016-08-12Th-11457http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810032229Early elimination of un-productive crosses and handling of reasonably a large segregating populations derived from a few promising crosses will help enhance efficiency of crop breeding. Further, direct selection for economically important traits such as pod yield and its component traits has been less effective. The indirect selection for such difficult–to-breed traits based on easily observable/assayable/scorable traits is likely to be more effective. However, such a strategy requires a priori identification of traits strongly associated with difficult-to-breed traits. The combination of high quantitative traits means, absolute and standardized range, variances and frequency of transgressive segregants estimated in F2 and F3 generations was used as the criterion to assess and identify crosses with high breeding potential in terms of recovery of high frequency of pure-lines with desirable combinations of target traits in dolichos bean. The correlation coefficients of easily observable traits such as plant height, primary branches plant-1, racemes plant-1 and raceme length with dry pod and dry seed yield plant-1 were estimated to identify the traits which were significantly associated with later traits. Based on these criteria, the crosses, HA 10-8 × RIL 3-180 and FPB 21 × RIL 3-180 were predicted to have better breeding potential. The traits such as plant height, racemes plant-1 and raceme length were suggested for use as surrogates of dry pod and dry seed yield plant-1 for developing improved pure-line varieties of dolichos bean.ennullThesis