Abstract
Cowpea is an important tropical crop. It provides a large proportion of the food resource for the African human population and their livestock. The yield and quality of cowpea have been dramatically improved through traditional breeding strategies for the past few decades. However, reports of heritability estimates for early growth of cowpea are rare. We designed a simple experiment to estimate the broad-sense heritability of early growth. We randomly selected 15 cowpea varieties among a total of 5000 cowpea accessions maintained in the cowpea breeding facility at the University of California, Riverside to examine the genetic determination of early growth of cowpea (measured as the height at day five after seeding). The estimated broad-sense heritability on the individual plant basis is 0.2190. However, the corresponding estimate on the plant mean basis (average of four plants) is 0.5198, which is very high for a quantitative trait. The high heritability may explain why traditional breeding for cowpea growth is so effective. Since the design of experiment and method of data analysis are novel, this report can serve as an educational note for students in the area of quantitative genetics and plant breeding.
Highlights
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is a member of the Phaseoleae tribe of the Leguminosae family
The total phenotypic variance among the F2 consists of the genetic variance and the environmental variance
The environmental variance can be estimated by the average of the phenotypic variance among plants of the parental lines
Summary
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is a member of the Phaseoleae tribe of the Leguminosae family. A simple method commonly used to estimate trait heritability in cowpea is to measure the phenotypic variance among F2 individuals developed from the cross between two inbred lines. The total phenotypic variance among the F2 consists of the genetic variance and the environmental variance. The environmental variance can be estimated by the average of the phenotypic variance among plants of the parental lines. The difference between the phenotypic variance of the F2 individuals and the environmental variance estimated from the parents is the genetic variance. The ratio of the genetic variance to the total phenotypic variance is the estimated heritability. This type of analysis has a narrow inference space because it highly depends on the genetic differences between the two particular inbred lines selected. Heritability estimated from the cross of two inbred lines cannot be generalized to other populations or line crosses
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