Exploiting heterosis and combining ability of sunflower at seedling stage

Muhammad Ahsan Iqbal, Rabia Za

Abstract

Sunflower is a non-traditional crop used for edible purpose. It is mainly used as edible oil crop in Russia and Europe. It is fourth biggest edible source after soybean in world and second after rapeseed in Europe. Pakistan is also fulfilling its 18% oil’s demand after cotton. Exploiting heterosis and combining ability of yield and oil content of sunflower will increase the oil percentage in crop. Experiment was performed in Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics and Centre of Agricultural Biochemistry and Biotechnology (CABB), University of Agriculture, Faisalabad. The data was taken for seven seedling traits viz, seedling germination percentage (%), root length (cm), shoot length (cm), fresh root weight (g), fresh shoot weight (g), dry root weight (g) and dry shoot weight (g). Sixteen hybrids grown in line x tester manner and were evaluated for seedling traits. Objective of this study was to evaluate the seedling traits and exploit heterosis, GCA and SCA of given genotypes for using them in better hybrid seed development. Results showed that lines and testers showed positive GCA effect for shoot length, root length and root fresh weight while hybrids have negative SCA effect for all the traits. Cross B-SIN-82 × RL-54 showed significant positive heterosis for seed germination percentage and root dry weight. Cross B-SIN-82 × RL-51 also showed significant positive heterosis for root length while all other crosses showed non-significant heterosis and heterobeltiosis for all the seedling traits. So, twoBSIN-82 × RL-54 andB-SIN-82 × RL-51 crosses were used in hybrid development for improving seed germination percentage, root dry weight and root length of the hybrid.