Impact of reproductive duration on yield and its component traits in lentil

Development of early maturing genotypes with high biomass is one of the important aims of lentil breeding program as early genotypes escape terminal drought. Therefore, in the present study, impact of reproductive duration on yield and other traits was studied among 194 accessions of lentil. Significant variability was observed for reproductive duration and other agronomically important traits except harvest index. This study showed that reproductive duration had negative impact on yield but long reproductive duration helped to increase seed size. The results of this study showed that variability for reproductive duration depends upon days to 50% flowering rather than days to maturity as both these traits have highly significant negative correlation with each other. Therefore manipulation of days to 50% flowering is important to increase or decrease the reproduction duration. For making yield improvement in lentil, it is very important to increase biological yield/plant, which had positive relationship with grain yield. Plant height and pods/plant had positive impact on biological yield indicating that higher yield is not due to the efficient partitioning of photosynthetic assimilates. No association of harvest index with reproductive duration in present study also supported it. On the basis of scatter diagrams, genotype LL 864 was identified for maximum pods/plant, high biological yield and high yield, and genotype IC520341 for early flowering. These genotypes along with early vigor genotypes could be useful in lentil breeding program for developing early maturing high yielding genotypes in lentil.