Author(s):

Muttappa Hosamani, I Shankergoud, PH Zaidi, Ayyanagouda Patil, MT Vinayan, PH Kuchanur, K Seetharam and Somasekhar

Abstract: Understanding the genotypic variability, heritability and genetic advance of traits in any plant population is an im¬portant pre-requisite for selection programme. This study was designed to assess the genotypic variability, heritability and genetic advance for various characters of maize testcrosses derived from two heat tolerant multi-parental synthetic (MPS 1 and MPS 2) populations. The trial consisted of 407 testcrosses of MPS 1 and 475 testcrosses of MPS 2. They were evaluated in Alpha lattice design with two replications at Main Agriculture Research Station, Raichur, Karnataka during spring season where the most part of reproductive stage, starting from tassel emergence until late grain filling, was exposed to heat stress. Analysis of variance revealed that the mean sum of squares due to genotypes in MPS 1 differed significantly for grain yield and MPS 2 showed significant variation among genotypes for all the characters studied, indicating the presence of variability for all the traits in the germplasm utilized for present study. Phenotypic coefficient of variation was higher than the corresponding genotypic coefficient of variation for all the characters studied. High to moderate estimates of PCV and GCV were recorded for grain yield and anthesis-silking interval suggesting sufficient variability for the traits, thus offering scope for genetic improvement through selection. Heritability and genetic advance were low for all the traits. These results suggested that the traits viz., days to 50 per cent anthesis, days to 50 per cent silking, anthesis-silking interval, plant height (cm), ear height (cm) and grain yield (t haË—1) were under the control of non-additive gene action in both the MPS populations.

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