1Centre for Plant Breeding and Genetics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641 003, India.
2Department of Cotton, Centre for Pl. Breeding and Genetics, TNAU, Coimbatore-641 003.
An experiment was conducted to study the genetics of yield and its components in diallel cross (excluding reciprocals) of Maize involving 11 inbreds. All the 11 parents and 55 hybrids generated were raised in a randomised block design (RBD) with three replications. Analysis of variance components indicated the importance of over dominance and epistasis in the inheritance of plant height, leaf length, number of kernels per row and seed yield per plant. Dominance effect was found to influence the inheritance of ear length. Over dominance was preponderant in the expression of ear diameter. Correlation between parental order of dominance for each array and mean of common parents of the array was negative for plant height, leaf length, ear length, ear diameter, number of grains per row and seed yield per plant, which indicated that increasing genes contained in the parents were dominant. All the six characters recorded low heritability. Heterosis breeding, population improvement through reciprocal recurrent selection, bi-parental mating and diallel selective mating could be employed for improvement of these traits.
