Causal Influence of Background Traits on Fruit Yield in Egg Plant (Solanum melongena L.)

Correlations and path co-efficients were studied for fruit yield per per plant and its contributing traits in Seventy-five genotypes of brinjal. Genotypic correlations were higher in magnitude over phenotypic correlation. Fruit yield per plant had the highest positive correlation with number of fruits per plant followed by average fruit weight. Further partitioning of correlation revealed that number of fruits per plant and average fruit weight had high positive direct effect on fruit yield per plant. It appears that these characters may be used for selecting high yielding plants in brinjal.