Abstract:
The present investigation was carried out in two different seasons with aim to find out the gene action for inheritance of morphological, yield and quality traits in bottle gourd. The present study was comprised of 45 crosses developed through diallel mating design using 10 parents namely, NDBG-49-2 (P
1), N. Rashmi (P
2), N. Prabha (P
3), N. Pooja (P
4), Pusa Naveen (P
5), Pb. Komal (P
6), NDBG S-1 (P
7), PBOG-3 (P
8), NDBG-11 (P
9) and Faizabadi Local (P
10) at MES, Vegetable Science, NDUA.&T, Kumarganj, Faizabad (U.P.) India during
kharif 2015 (E
1), and
Rabi, 2015-16 (E
2). The experiments were laid out in RBD with three replications having each experimental unit of single row with spacing of 3.0 m × 0.5 m. The observations were recorded on parents and F
1’s for eighteen quantitative traits including six quality traits
viz days to first staminate flower anthesis, days to first pistillate flower anthesis, node number to first staminate flower, node number to first pistillate flower appearance, days to first fruit harvest, vine length at last picking stage (m), number of primary branches per plant, fruit length (cm), fruit circumference (cm), fruit weight (kg), number of fruits per plant, fruit yield per plant (kg), total soluble solids (°B), ascorbic acid (mg/100 g fresh fruit), reducing sugar (%), non-reducing sugar (%), total sugars (%) and dry matter content in fruit (%). The present study revealed that Highly significant values for additive (
) and dominance (
and
) effects of components were observed for most of the eighteen traits in both the seasons (E
1, E
2 ) except the values of
for days to first staminate flower anthesis, number of fruit per plant, reducing sugar and total sugars and node number to first staminate flower appearance and days to first fruit harvest in E
1 and values of
for node number to first staminate flower appearance, node number to first pistillate flower appearance in E
1 which showed non-significant Both additive and dominance variance were found important in the inheritance of most of the traits, whereas dominance variance were more prominent than the additive variance. Average degree of dominance revealed the presence of over dominance for all the characters in during both the seasons (E
1,E
2).Theproportionsofgenes(
/4
)in the parents were less than 0.25 for all the traits indicating asymmetrical distribution of alleles at loci showing dominance during both the seasons (E
1, E
2).