STUDY OF VARIABILITY AND ITS IMPLICATION IN SELECTION FOR HIGH YIELDING GENOTYPES OF MUNGBEAN

Abstract

The present experiment was conducted with 29 summer genotypes of mungbean at the experimental field of Genetic and Plant Breeding Department, HSTU, Dinajpur during March to June 2006 to study variability, heritability, genetic advance, interrelationship and path coefficient among 11 important characters. Significant variations were observed among the 29 mungbean genotypes for all characters except primary branches. BD6936 for early flowering (34.33days) and early maturing (74.00days); BD6902, BD6903, BD6920 and BD6912 for plant height (79.93cm); BD6876 and BD6894 for clusters/plant (22.83); BD688land BD6933 for pods/cluster (4.93); BD6876 for pods/plant (79.47); BD6933 for pod length (11.94cm), seeds/pod (12.87); BD6874, BD6884, and BD6899 for seed yield/plant (41.51g); and BD6935 for 1000- seed weight (74.32g) were found to be superior genotypes. Including seed yield, all characters except primary branches/plant, pods/cluster, seeds/pod exhibited high heritability accompanied by medium to high genetic advance as percent of mean. Significant genotypic correlation coefficients were found to be higher than their corresponding phenotypic ones. Clusters/plant, pods/plant, pods/cluster, pod length, seeds/pod and 1000-seed weight showed significant and positive relationships with seed yield/plant. Path coefficient analysis suggested that clusters/plant, pods/plant, and 1000-seed weight contributed maximum to seed yield having positive direct effect. Thus, selection based on pods/plant, clusters/plant and 1000-seed weight might be effective for improving seed yield in summer mungbean.