Combining ability for characters related to yield and earliness in bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.)

An experiment was under taken to study thecombining ability analysis using ten parental lines andtheir 90 F1 hybrids of bitter gourd obtained from fulldiallel analysis for yield and its contributing characters.The mean squares due to GCA and SCA were signifiedfor all the characters. The ratio of o2 g/o2 s was lessfor yield of fruits per vine, ascorbic acid content andiron content thereby indicating preponderance of nonadditive(dominance) variance in expression of thesetraits. Out of the ten parents, CO-1 and Preethi were thebest general combiners as it showed desirable GCAeffects in favourable direction for most of the traits.Regarding the SCA effects MC-105 x MC-10 showedhighest SCA effects for total fruit yield per plant andnumber of fruits per plant. For days to first harvestPreethi x CO-1 showed desirable SCA effects infavourable direction. Hence these parents may be usedas one of the parents in bitter gourd breeding programme.