Gene Effects for Yield and its Components in Chickpea

Generation mean analysis was undertaken to estimate the gene action operating in the inheritance of yield and its components in two chickpea crosses. Six basic generations viz., P₁, P₂, F₁, BC₁, BC₂ and F₂ of two crosses, namely GNG 469 x ICCV 93929 (C1) and PBG 5 x ICCV 93929 (C2) were studied. Scaling tests A, B, C and Joint Scaling test were applied to test the adequacy of aditive-dominance model for eleven agronomic traits. Significant c² values indicated higher order of interactions for all traits except grain yield/plant for C2. Generally, the dominance component was higher in magniture than additive component except for days to maturity (C1), pods/plant (both crosses), grain yield/plant (C2). Duplicate types of epistasis was present in most of the cases. Thus, it can be concluded that additive, dominance and epistatic gene effects contribute significantly to the inheritance of various component characters in chickpea and the improvement can be sought by bulk method followed by modified pedigree method.