NIDHI DUBEY, H. A. AVINASHE* AND A. N. SHRIVASTAVA
Department of Genetics & Plant Breeding, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara-144 411 (Punjab), India
*(e-mail : havinashe@gmail.com; Mobile : 90567-87045)
ABSTRACT
The genetic variability studies carried out on 50 soybean genotypes indicated that the estimates of phenotypic coefficient of variation were greater than those of the genotypic coefficient of variation for all the traits studied. The close proximity between PCV and GCV values for most of the characters indicated less influence of environment on the expression of the characters under study. Considering heritability, most of the characters showed high values. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance as per cent of mean was recorded for biological yield per plant, harvest index, number of seeds per plant, seed yield per plant and number of pods per plant indicating the scope of improvement through direct selection. Correlation analysis revealed that number of pods per node, number of seeds per plant, biological yield per plant, number of nodes per plant and harvest index were positively and significantly associated with seed yield per plant. Path analysis revealed that number of pods per node had the high positive direct effect on seed yield per plant followed by number of nodes per plant, number of seed yield per plant, biological yield per plant and harvest index. Traits viz., number of pods per plant, days to 50% flowering and days to maturity had negative direct effect on seed yield per plant. Most of the other traits had indirect effect via number of branches per plant, number of pods per plant and 100-seed weight. Hence, these characters should be given more weightage in selection programme of high yielding soybean genotypes
Key words : Soybean, correlation coefficient, path analysis, genetic variability