Manifestation of heterosis breeding for fruit yield and its attributing traits in brinjal (Solanum melongena)

A field experiment was conducted during rabi 2011 and kharif of 2012 to estimate the magnitude of heterosis and heterobeltiosis for fruit yield and its attributing traits in brinjal. Ten indigenous parental lines of brinjal were selected and crossed in a half diallel-fashion and the resultant 45 F1 hybrids (excluding reciprocals) along with their parents were evaluated for yield and its component traits in a randomized block design (RBD) with three replications. The observations were recorded on five randomly selected plants per replication for each genotype on eight important characters, viz. days to first flowering, days to 75% flowering, days to first fruit harvest, number of fruit clusters/ plant, fruit width (cm), number of fruits/plant, average fruit weight (g) and average fruit yield/plant (kg). Relative heterosis and heterobeltiosis provides an idea about the nature of gene actions involved in the genetic control of the concerned trait. Relative heterosis besides epistatic effects also indicate the presence of dominance effects (intra allelic interaction), while heterosis is indicative of over dominance. Analysis of variance and result reveals highly significant difference for almost all the characters. The heterosis and heterobeltiosis ranged from 23.33 to 197. 80% and from 21.06 to 166.03 %, respectively. The results of present investigation also revealed that the crosses P7 × P8 (PPC × Udaipur local) and P8 × P10 (Udaipur local and Pusa Bhairav) exhibited high degree of heterosis and heterobeltiosis for fruit yield and other yield attributing traits, viz. fruit weight, fruit width and number of fruits/cluster indicating the additive or synergistic effect of the component characters on fruit yield.