Genetic analysis of some agronomic characters in chickpea ( Cicer aretinum L.)

Abstract

A 5×5 half-diallel cross set of chickpea (Arman, Hashem, ILC588, ICCV2 and ILC3279) was studied to estimate the gene effects and genetic parameters of twenty traits including days to 50% flowering, days to podding, days to maturity, plant height, basal pod height, plant ordinate, root length, number of primary branches, number of secondary branches, biomass, pods weight per plant, straw yield per plant, 100- Seed weight, number of pods per plant, number of empty pods per plant, number of double seed pods per plant, number of single seed pods per plant, number of seeds per plant, seed yield per plant, seed size, harvest index. This study was carried out at the experimental farm of the Sara-rood dry land research sub institutes, in Kerman Shah Province (west of Iran) during the spring of 2007. According to analysis of variance for diallel, only additive genes effects were found significant for plant height (cm), pod height (cm) and number of primary branches, empty pods and straw yield (gr) per plant. In addition to the significant additive gene effects, dominant gene effects were significant for days to 50% flowering, days to podding, days to maturity, biological yield (gr), 100-seed weight (gr), seed size, harvest index, pod weight (gr), number of pods, single seed pods, seeds number and seed yield per plant (gr), but about plant ordinate and number of double seed pods per plant only dominant gene effects were significant. Additive and dominant gene effects were not found significant for root length and number of secondary branches. Estimates of genetic parameters also revealed that additive and dominance variance were significant for most studied traits in this research. However, both the additive and dominance gene affects together importance to control of most quantitative traits in the chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). The degree of dominance average (H1/D)1/2 (H1 = dominance variance, D= additive variance) was higher than one, indicating over dominance for all traits except for PHT, BPHT and HI. The narrow-sense heritability was high for HI (67%), 100-seed weight (56%), SS (55%), basal pod height (47%), PHT (42%) and SY/p (37%) indicating that great genetic gain could be achieved for them.