GENETIC ASSOCIATION AMONG DIFFERENT CHARACTERS IN BIDI TOBACCO (NICOTIANA TABACUM L.)

Abstract

Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) is an industrial plant because of its cured leaves which are used in cigarette, bidi, and cigar making. Due to the economic significance of cured leaves, the correlated response of cured leaves with other traits is of vital importance in tobacco breeding programmes. In the present research, correlation and path analysis is used to determine the inter relationship among cured leaf yield and other yield attributing traits .A field experiment was undertaken at Regional Agriculture Research Station, Nandyal, Kurnool Dt. Andhra Pradesh during 2017-18 in vertisols under rainfed condition to study twenty five genotypes of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) for correlations and path analysis. The estimates of correlation coefficient revealed that cured leaf yield was positively correlated at both genotypic and phenotypic levels with days to flowering (rg=0.782 * * , rp=0.502 * * ), number of leaves per plant (rg=0.854 * * , rp=0.874 * * ), plant height (rg=0.704 * * , rp=0.777 * * ), days to maturity (rg=0.575 * * , rp=0.431 * * ), leaf length (rg=0.670 * * ,rp=0.811 * * ) and leaf width (rg=0.883 * * ,rp=0.646 * * ), while it was negatively correlated with leaf thickness (rg= -0.623 * * ,rp= 0.781 * * ), nicotine (rg= -0.019 ,rp= -0.012) and reducing sugar content (rg= -0.343 * * ,rp= -425 * * ). Path analysis based on genotypic correlation showed that number of leaves per plant (0.846 * * ), plant height (0.781 * * ) and leaf length (0.865 * * ) are important characters that shows considerable direct effect on cured leaf yield and these characters are to be considered for improving the cured leaf yield, in bidi tobacco