Department of Vegetable Crops, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana -141 004
The means and variances of six basic generations from four inter varietal crosses of okra were partitioned into their genetic components to assess the gene action governing the inheritance of fruit yield and component traits. In general all the traits were governed by additive, dominance and digenic non-allelic gene interactions. The non-additive gene effects were more pronounced than additive ones for most of the traits in both the environments. The evidence of duplicate type of epistasis has been obtained for all the characters in different crosses in both the seasons. Thus for okra improvement recurrent selection in biparental progenies would help in exploiting the duplicate type of non-allelic interactions and allow recombination and concentration of genes having cumulative effects in a population.
Okra, Gene effects, epistasis, scales, recurrent selection
