Gene effects on vegetative and floral characters of gerbera (Gerbera jamesonii L) Under Naturally ventilated polyhouse conditions

Abstract

A polyhouse experiment was conducted for ten diverse genotypes of gerbera for twenty characters in Randomized Block Design with three replications at College of Horticulture, SKLTSHU, Hyderabad. Path analysis revealed that days to first-flower opening (1.976) exerted the highest positive direct effect on number of flowers per plant followed by, leaf area (0.8600), number of ray florets (0.6080) and length of the flower stalk (0.5841), number of leaves per plant (0.4315), fresh weight of flower (0.3884), number of suckers per plant (0.3381), chlorophyll content (0.2687), duration of flowering (0.2622), flower stalk diameter (0.1798) and field life (0.0514) at genotypic level indicating that the selection for these characters was likely to bring about an overall improvement in yield of gerbera cut flowers.