Jadeja, G. C.PATEL, BHAVESHKUMAR RAMANBHAI2018-06-202018-06-202004http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810054442Brinjal {Solarium melongena L. 2n=24) also known as egg plant is an important vegetable crop of India. In India, brinjal occupies an area of about 0.51 million hectare with production of 8.80 million tonnes. In Gujarat, it is cultivated in 31,183 hectares giving a production of 5,43,076 tonnes. Inspite of a large number of varieties available in India, only a few are promising, and generally they are improved varieties. Though the wide genetic variability is available in this crop, it has not been utilized and exploited fully. To maintain the uniformity of fruits and to increase yield levels development of hybrid varieties as well as improved varieties having high yield with desired morphological and quality characters is also an urgent need of recent time. Keeping in view the importance of brinjal and need for its improvement, an experiment was conducted to analyze the extent of relative heterosis, heterobeltiosis and standard heterosis among thirty-one hybrids developed from fourteen selected diverse parents. Further the developed genotypes were subjected for character association study to know the association of various agronomically important and some quality traits viz., days to flowering, average fruit weight, fruit length, fruit girth, number of fruits per plant, number of functional branches, plant height, moisture, dry matter, total soluble sugar and phenol with fruit yield per plant and also among themselves. These genotypes were grown in 7 x 7 simple lattice design with two replications. The experiment was conducted at Main Vegetable Research Station, Gujarat Agricultural University, Anand Campus, Anand during kharif- rabi 2001-2002. Out of thirty-one crosses studied, extent of relative heterosis, heterobeltosis and standard heterosis were computed using the mean values. Highest amount of relative heterosis was recorded by cross Doli-5 x AB-99-4 for average fruit weight, followed by cross KS-331 x AB-99-4 for fruit yield per plant. Study on heterobeltiosis and relative heterosis showed similar findings. In both the cases the cross Doli-5 x AB-99-33 reported the highest value for the average fruit weight followed by cross Doli-5 x AB-99-33 for average fruit length. The highest expression of standard heterosis was found for cross Doli-5 x GP-217 for number of fruits per plant followed by cross BB-71 x AB-99-33 for phenol content. Hybrid BB-71 x Green Castor long was found to be a good as it exhibited moderate, high and very high significant to highly significant values of heterosis, heterobeltiosis and standard heterosis for different traits studied except for moisture content. Parent BB-71 was found to be a very promising combiner as it's crosses showed significant and highly significant values for most of the traits under study, this suggests the need to exploit the present material for combining ability study to work out good breeding plan for the improvement of the present status of the crop. Correlation coefficient analysis reported that, only days to flowering was having desirable significant effect on fruit yield per plant in negative direction, whereas all the other traits exhibited non significant association. Number of functional branches showed highly significant positive correlation with number of fruits per plant and significant positive correlation with fruit length respectively. Path coefficient analysis based on genotypic correlation revealed that days to flowering is the major yield attributing trait, suggesting earliness as the highly influencing trait to be considered as very important trait for selecting high yielding genotypes. The indirect effect of number of functional branches on fruit yield via number of fruits per plant was moderate and coupled with highly significant positive correlation value, indicated the importance of selection of highly functional branched genotypes. The finding of the present investigation lead to the conclusion that the scope of improving the present status of brinjal crop through heterosis breeding is high. Earliness coupled with high functional branching habit of the plant is the desirable ideotype to be selected as per the character association study for effective results.enPLANT BREEDING AND GENETICS, AGRICULTUREAN ANALYSISThesis