DIALLEL‐SAS: A SAS Program for Griffing's Diallel Analyses

Abstract

AbstractDiallel mating designs are generally used to obtain estimates of genetic effects for a fixed set of parental lines (fixed effects) or to estimate general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA) variance components from a set of randomly chosen parental lines (random effects) from multiple‐environment experiments. Published computer programs for diallel analyses do not provide a partition of F1 hybrids ✕ environments interaction into GCA ✕ environments, SCA ✕ environments, and reciprocal ✕ environments components for Griffing's Methods 1 and 3, and into GCA ✕ environments and SCA ✕ environments components for Griffing's Methods 2 and 4. Existing programs for Methods 1 and 3 also do not partition reciprocal effects into maternal and nonmaternal effects. This paper reports the development of a comprehensive SAS program (DIALLEL‐SAS) for partitioning interactions between environments (years and/or locations) and F1 hybrids. DIALLEL‐SAS can be run on any microcomputer with SAS, as well as on mainframe computers installed with SAS via UNIX or TSO. The DIALLEL‐SAS output includes (i) mean squares for environments, F1 hybrids, F1 hybrids ✕ environments, GCA, SCA, reciprocal, maternal, nonmaternal, GCA ✕ environments, SCA ✕ environments, reciprocal ✕ environments, maternal ✕ environments, nonmaternal ✕ environments, (ii) estimates of GCA and maternal effects for each parental line, and (iii) estimates of SCA, nonmaternal, and reciprocal effects for each F1 hybrid.