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Materials and Methods

Ten varieties of bread wheat [Triticum aestivum (L.) Thell], namely, Moncho, Pavon, Brochis, Chiroca, HD 2204, Raj 1482, WL 711, Raj 821, D 65 and Kharchia 65, were crossed in all possible combinations excluding reciprocals. The resulting 45 F1's were grown to get F2's seeds. Parents along with their 45 F1's and F2's were grown in a randomised block design with three replications under early, normal and late sown conditions (environments). Each plot consisted of single 5m row length of parent and F1 and 10 rows of F2 with the spacing of 30 cm between rows and 15 cm between plants. Ten competitive plants in parents and F1's and twenty plants in F2 progenies were selected randomly for recording observations (
Table 1) under each environment separately.

The mean of each plot was used for statistical analysis. The data were first subjected to the usual analysis followed for a randomised block design for pooled over environments. The combining ability analysis was done following Method 2, Model 1 of Griffing (1956).


Results and Discussion.

Pooled analysis of variance over the environments revealed highly significant differences amongst them. So was true for genotype x environment interactions.

The analysis of variance for combining ability for the data pooled over three environments (
Table 1) showed that mean squares due to general combining ability (gca) and specific combining ability (sea) were significant for all the traits studied in both F1 and F2 generations except tiller number and variance due to gca for grain yield, sea for days to heading, number of spikelets per spike in F1 generation, sea for number of grains per spike in F2 generation, signifying the importance of both additive and non-additive gene effects in controlling the inheritance of yield and its component traits.

However, the gca variance was found higher than sea variance in both the generations, indicating the preponderance of additive gene effects for yield components but for grain yield sea variance was predominant. The findings of Jaimini and Mathur (1980), Shrivastava et al. (1981), Sharma and Singh (1983), Sharma et al. (1986), Rajora (1992), Singh et al. (1993) and Solanki et al. (1993) are in agreement with the present results. Results further revealed that tiller number, days to heading, number of spikelets per spike and number of grains per spike were highly influenced by the genotype environmental interaction. This is corroborated by the estimates of heterosis as heterosis for these traits was non-significant.

Both the gca and sea exhibited highly significant interaction with the environments for yield and its components in both the generations, indicating the role of environment in influencing the gene effects. Other studies (Jatasara and Paroda 1981; Shanna and Singh 1982; Kumar et al. 1983; Singh et al. 1986; Dasgupta and Mondal 1988) substantiate this point. However, gca x environment interaction variances were higher than sea x environment variances for all the traits except grain yield in both the generations, further signifying the importance of additive genetic variance for yield components.

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