Gene action and combining ability analysis for horticultural traits in bitter gourd

All traits exhibited higher variance due to sca than their respective gca variance indicating the predominanceof non-additive genes effects in the expression of all the traits. Among parents, gynoecious line PDMGy-201 wasgood general combiner for earliness, sex ratio and flesh thickness, S-2 for fruit length, S-54 for fruit diameter,Pusa Do Mausami (PDM) for average fruit weight and Pusa Aushadhi (PA) for number of fruits and total yieldper plant. The hybrids which showed best sca effects were PDMGy201 × S-2 for earliness and sex ratio, S-54× S-57 for fruit weight and flesh thickness and PDMGy201 × Pusa Vishesh (PV) for number of fruits and totalyield per plant. The role of cumulative effect of additive and additive × additive gene effects were found in thecrosses PDMGy-201 × S-54 for number of days to first female flower and S-2 × PDM for yield per plant which hadhigh per se performance with significant sca effects and both the parents of these crosses were good generalcombiners. The role of dominant gene action denoted in high performed crosses resulted from a combinationbetween one good and one poor general combiner parent such as PDMGy-201 × S-2 for sex ratio, S-32 × PA forfruit length, S-54 × S-57 for fruit diameter, S-54 × S-57 for flesh thickness, S-2 × PA for number of fruits per plant,PDMGy-201 × PDM for average fruit weight and PDMGy-201 × PV for yield per plant. Almost all hybrids withhigher sca effects have at least one of the most outstanding parental lines, PDMGy-201, PDM, S-2, PV and PA.