1Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, N. M. College of Agriculture, Navsari Agricultural University, Navsari-396 450, Gujarat, India
2Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, B. A. College of Agriculture, Anand Agricultural University, Anand-388 110, Gujarat, India
*e-mail: soni1211@gmail.com
Online published on 13 January, 2016.
Estimates of gene effects based on analysis of generation mean were obtained for nine traits in three crosses in castor (Ricinus communis L.): SKP-84 x DCS-94, VP-1 x DCS-94 and GEETA x GC-3. The study material includes P1, P2, F1, F2, BC1 and BC2 generations of these crosses. The individual scaling test and joint scaling test indicated that an additive-dominance model was adequate in three traits viz., length of main raceme, number of effective branches per plant and seed index in the cross VP-1 x DCS-94. The analysis showed the presence of additive, dominance and epistasis gene effects for the traits. However, to exploit both additive and non-additive gene action reciprocal recurrent or bi parental mating procedure may be adopted for improvement of traits. Duplicate epistasis played a greater role than complementary epistasis.
Castor, Gene action, Generation mean, Polygenic traits, Scaling test
