Combining ability studies for earliness and yield attributing characters in bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.]

Abstract

A combining ability study involving 10 lines and 4 testers namely VRBG-107, VRBG-408, VRBG-1001, VRBG-1003, IC-092467, IC-144389, NDBG-104, DVBG-2, PBOG-40, IC-042345(lines); PSPL, Pusa Naveen, Arka Bahar and Selection-1(testers) mated in line x tester fashion producing hybrids were evaluated at Vegetable Research Farm, Department of Horticulture, Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (U.P.) during the Spring-Summer 2015. Up on examining the data it was revealed that NDBG-104 the best general combiner among the parents for most of the characters in desired direction, while among the crosses NDBG-104 x PSPL was found to be good specific combiner and also revealed that crosses involving at least one good general combiner can yield a good cross combination. The gca and sca variance ratio showed that both additive and non-additive gene actions were found to govern most of the characters under study.