Journal of Medicinal and Aromatic Plant Sciences

Abstract

Combining ability studies for eight parents and their all possible crosses (excluding reciprocals) in opium poppy were carried out at experimental farm of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Rajasthan College of Agriculture, Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture and Technology, Udaipur (Rajasthan). The experiment was conducted in a random block design with three replications and estimated the combining ability for latex yield and yield related traits. Combining ability analysis indicated that mean square due to gca and sca were significant for all the characters, expect for plant height for sca, indicating the importance of both additive as well as nonadditive genetic effect for the inheritance of all the characters under pooled over environments. Parents UOP-69, UOP-80 and UOP-99 were good combiners for most of the important characters specially latex yield per plant,seed yield per plant, effective capsules per plant, seed harvest index and morphine content in pooled over the environments. The parent UOP-53 was also good combiner for morphine content. The parent UOP-79 possessed good nicking ability for earliness and short plant stature. On pooled basis, the hybrids UOP-80 x UOP-20, UOP-53 x UOP-1185, UOP-79 x UOP-60, UOP-79 x UOP-20, UOP-79 x UOP-1185 UOP-80 x UOP-1185 also showed high SCA effect for latex, seed and husk yield per plant. The obtained data can be used for exploitation of heterosis for latex yield potential and other related traits.