Effect of sampling the diallel cross on the estimation of some genetic parameters

In complete diallel cross (CDC), with n inbred lines, there would be n(n-1)/2 crosses, excluding selfings and reciprocal crosses. As n increases, this number increases rapidly. With limited resources, it may not always be possible to handle all the crosses. In such cases one can perform only a sample of all possible crosses among the inbred lines. Such diallel crosses are known as partial diallel crosses (PDC). The method of analysing CDC and PDC with several characters have been applied to data on wheat (7 × 7 diallel) and triticale (8 × 8 diallel) to estimate heritabilities, genetic correlations and efficiencies of discriminant function. In the case of wheat, 14 crosses out of 21 were sampled according to design of Kempthorne and Curnow (K and C) with s=4, k=2. In the case of Triticale, four different sampling designs viz. factorial design (n=8, s=4) group divisible design (n=8, s=6), K and C design with n=8, s=5, k=2 and K and C design with n=8, s=3 and k=2 were used.