Genetic analysis of yield and quantitative traits in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan L. Millsp.)

Abstract

Basic information on genetics and inheritance of quantitative characters, which is necessary to develop future breeding programme, is not widely studied in pigeonpea. Hence, present study was conducted among 5 generations in four pigeonpea crosses to know significance of additive-dominance model, gene action involved in inheritance of quantitative characters, heritability and genetic advance. “Scaling” and “joint scaling test” was significant for most characters indicating that additive-dominance model alone is not enough to explain the inheritance of a character. Though additive variance was more, dominance variance also played important role for most of the traits. Positive and negative alleles were found to be distributed between parents. Additive gene effect (d) was significant for pods per plant and seeds per pod whereas dominance gene effect (h) was more predominant among pod yield and seed yield. Dominance × Dominance inter-allelic interactions (l) was more important than Additive × Additive type (i) for most of the traits studied which could be exploited by selecting individuals based on their performance in recurrent selection. Complementary gene action was observed among many traits with few exhibiting duplicate gene action. Heritability and genetic advance was high indicating the effectiveness of selection. Since dominance effects is also present along with additive effects selection could be practised in later generations to identify high yielding genotypes.