Agricultural Science Digest

Blackgram is an important pulse crop grown in India. The creation of new variability through hybridization or mutation breeding will produce novel segregants for important yield attributing traits. The selection from the population will be effective if the traits have good genetic variability estimates.

The present investigation was conducted on analysing genetic variability parameters in F₂ populations of the blackgram crosses CO 5 × VBN 9 and CO 6 × VBN 11 which were evaluated during rabi, 2022.

Based on the coefficient of variations, it was found that sufficient amount of genetic variability and high to moderate heritability with high genetic advance were present in the populations for the traits viz., plant height, number of branches per plant, number of clusters per plant, number of pods per cluster, number of pods per plant and seed yield per plant indicates the presence of additive gene action which can be improved by simple selection in the earlier generations. The positive skewness was observed for the traits viz., number of branches per plant, number of pods per cluster, number of pods per plant, hundred seed weight and seed yield per plant in F₂ population of CO 5 × VBN 9 and number of clusters per plant, number of pods per cluster, number of pods per plant and seed yield per plant in the F₂ population of CO 6 × VBN 11. The above traits could be improved by intensive selection for rapid improvement. The leptokurtic nature of the distribution for the trait hundred seed weight in CO 5 × VBN 9 population and the traits viz., number of clusters per plant, number of pods per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod and seed yield per plant in CO 6 × VBN 11 population indicates that these traits are controlled by few minor genes. Hence, the good segregants could be selected from these two populations for yield improvement.