Inheritance of Fruit Length, Diameter and Number of Fruit Ridges in Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) Landraces of Jordan

Nine landraces of okra were evaluated for fruit length, diameter and number of ridges per fruit. Crosses between the diverse parents for each character were made to study the inheritance of such traits in P1, P2, F1, F2, BC1 and BC2 generations. It is reported that fruit length, diameter and number of ridges are quantitatively inherited traits. Mean generation analysis showed that dominance is the major contribution to variation in fruit length and number of ridges per fruit, while additive gene effect was predominant over dominance gene effect for fruit diameter. Significant dominance estimate was obtained toward thin fruit diameter over wide fruit diameter and toward high ridges over low number of ridges. Broad sense heritability estimates ranged from 20.3 to 78% for fruit length, 37.8 to 99% for immature fruit diameter, 40.5 to 96.5% for mature fruit diameter and from 12 to 81.2% for number of ridges. Minimum number of genes ranged from 3 to 10 for fruit length, 0.7 to 3.16 for immature fruit diameter, and 0.7 to 4.9 for mature fruit diameter and from 0.99 to 3.7 for number of ridges, indicating effectiveness of selection in early generation