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Materials and methods

The studies were conducted on ten cultivars of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) of diverse geographical origin, namely, Moncho, Pavon, Broohis, Chiroca, HD 2204, Raj 1482, WL 711, Raj
821, Durgapura 65 and Kharchia 65. The parents were crossed in all possible combinations, without reciprocals. The resulting 45 F1's were grown to get F2's seeds. All 45 F2's and ten parents were grown in a randomized block design with three replications under early, normal and late sown environments at the experimental field of the Department of Plant Breeding. Each plot consisted of single 5 m row length of parent and 10 rows of F2 with the spacing of 30 cm between rows and 15 cm between plants. Ten competitive plants in parents and twenty plants in F2 progenies were selected randomly for recording observations for grain yield and its ten component characters (Table 1) under each environment, separately. Pooled analysis of variance over the environments was done according to Panse and Sukhatme (1967). The variance components analyses were done as suggested by Hayman (1954).


Results and discussion

The pooled analysis of variance over the environments for the experimental design (
Table 1) showed highly significant differences amongst genotypes for all the traits studied. The genotype x environment interaction was also observed to be high for all the traits and is in agreement with those of Sharma and Singh (1982), Nanda et al. (1983), Sharma et al. (1986) and Dasgupta and Mondal (1988) who revealed the significant role of environments in the expression of yield and yield components in wheat.

As emphasized by Hayman (1954), the first important part of the analysis is testing the validity of the several assumptions underlying diallel analysis, vis: (1) diploid segregation, (2) homozygous parents, (3) no reciprocal differences, (4) no linkage, (5) no epistasis and (6) absence of multiple alleles. The absence of multiple allelism and independent distribution of genes are difficult to be established (Kempthrone 1956). Though diallel analysis has several limitations, the results obtained by many plant breeders do indicate that at least some insight could be made on the inheritance of relatively complex traits like yield even when only some of the assumptions are satisfied (Hayman 1954).

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