Abstract
Eight sunflower inbred lines were crossed in 8×8 diallel fashion (without reciprocal) and 28 F1 were developed at Oilseed Research Centre (ORC), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Gazipur in Rabi season, 2018. All F1 and their parents were planted in Rabi season 2019 to estimate general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA) effects for yield and yield attributes. The highly significant mean squares for genotypes for all the studied characters indicating wide variability in the parental materials. The highly significant GCA effects for stem diameter, days to maturity, number of seeds/head, 1000-seed weight and SCA effects for days to 50 flowering, days to maturity, head diameter, number of seeds/head, 1000-seed weight and seed yield were observed. The greater ratio of GCA/SCA implies the predominance of additive gene effect for all the studied characters. The parents, P1, P2, P3, P6 and P8 were found as good general combining parents for short duration, early maturity, lodging resistant, and 1000 seed weight. Crosses with the best SCA effects for some characters were found from the interaction of low × low, high × low, low × high or high × average combining parents. Further investigation on superiority and stability of good combining parents and hybrids over different years and locations is needed. Key words: Sunflower, Griffing’ method, general combining ability (GCA), specific combining ability (SCA).
Highlights
Edible oil is one of the major energy sources of our diet
The variance due to parents were significant for days to 50 flowering, stem diameter, number of seeds/head, seed yield/head and 1000 seed weight
The current study focus that the evaluated parental materials possess enough genetic diversity which could be used in the future sunflower varietal development program
Summary
Bangladesh faces lack of edible oil since long been ago and the area under cultivation of oilseed crops are decreasing day by day due to several reasons (Miah, 2014). A lion share of the edible oil requirement of our country is fulfilling through import by using a huge amount of foreign currency every year. This big gap of edible oil requirement and supply in our country can be reduced by increasing area under oilseed crop cultivation as well as cultivating high yielding oilseed crops with high edible oil, early maturity, biotic and abiotic stress resistant varieties. In Bangladesh, the area under oilseed crop cultivation is not possible to increase due to limited land resources.
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