Morphological characterization and evaluation of wood apple (Feronia limonia) accessions

Wood-apple (Feronia limonia L.) is an indigenous nutritionally and medicinally potential tree species belongs to the family Rutaceae. This species is remained underexploited due to a lack of awareness regarding its signif- cance and systematic study of its diversity. The present work was carried out to study variability for fruit traits in the accessions conserved in the field gene bank at ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru. Sixteen accessions were assessed for qualitative and quantitative traits. The tree height ranges between 5.60 m to 15.70 m, tree girth varied from 38.00 to 109.00 cm whereas, the weight of the fruit ranges between 83.11g and 332.03g. The percentage composition of pulp was 36.15 to 59.52% and the number of seeds/fruits ranged from 104–191. Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that fruit weight was positively and significantly correlated with pulp weight, fruit skull thickness, shell weight and number of seeds. Yield was positively and highly correlated with number of fruits. The wood apple genotypes showed genetic variation for physical and qualitative attributes. There is need for more collection, evaluation of wood apple diversity that can help with the selection of elite genotypes as well as provide a source for crop enhancement in future breeding programmes.