COMBINING ABILITY ANALYSIS FOR YIELD AND ITS COMPONENT CHARACTERS IN TRITICALE

Abstract

A 10 X 10 dialIel combining ability analysis showed that gca and sca variances were significant for all the characters except yield/plant for gca and number of tillers/plant for sca effects. The parent variety DTS 1112 was the best general combiner, followed by DTS 1227. Parent DTS 1112 is a good general combiner for plant height, spike length, spikeletslspike and l00-grain weight and DTS 1227for spike length, lOO-grain weight and yield/plant. In general, in the expression of high sca effects, all the combinations of parents, namely those with high Xhigh, high Xlow and low Xlow gca effects were involved. For improvement of the crop, reciprocal recurrent selection is suggested as it can exploit both additive as well as nonadditive gene effects.