The study revealed importance of epistasis in the inheritance of yield contributing traits and possibility of its detection in Safflower. Epistasis was present for all the characters except number of main branches per plant and oil content. In presence of epistasis the estimates of genetic components would be biased. The present analysis is applicable to those four characters for which the testers had extreme phenotypes. Thus precise estimates of additive and dominance components were obtained for only number of main branches per plant. In presence of preponderance of additivity, the methods like simple selection has been advocated for further improvement in safflower.
Epistasis, simplified triple test cross, safflower, Carthamus tinctorius
