Research article

Estimation of gene action for grain yield and its components in maize in bred lines

¹Muhammad Jaffer Ali, ¹Muhammad Saleem, ²Ghulam Abbas,³Hassan Raza, ⁴Muhammad Shahid Iqbal, ⁵Khalid Hussain and ⁶Muhammad Naeem Akhtar

¹Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad

²Rice Research Station Bahawalnagar, Pakistan

³Department of Botany, Govt. Postgraduate College, Layyah, Pakistan

⁴Ayub Agriculture Research Institute, Faisalabad, Pakistan

⁵Arid Zone Agriculture Research Institute Bhakar, Pakistan

⁶Pesticide Quality Control Laboratory, Multan, Pakistan

*corresponding Author E-mail: shahidkooria@gmail.com,+92-345-7708096

Accepted 21 May 2014

Abstract

The grain yield is a complex phenomenon enabling genetic dissection mandatory to improve the various characters in heterozygous crops like maize where direct practice of phenotypic selection may not be favorable. A set of 6 maize inbred lines was crossed in a diallel fashion to study the genes action controlling various quantitative traits.F1 seeds along with their parents were planted in RCBD with three replications. Analysis of variance showed that inbred lines differed significantly among each other for all traits. Variance/Co-variance graphs showed that plant height, leaf area, number of leaves per plant, number of kernel rows per ear, ear length, number of kernels per row, ear diameter, 100-kernel weight, and protein content under additive type of gene action while number of ears per plant was under the control of over-dominance type of gene action and yield per plant being controlled by complete dominance.

Keywords: Zea Mays, Inbred Line, Grain Yield, Diallel Graphical Approach, Gene Action